In Pakistan’s urban imagination, the Christian community is still often viewed through the narrow lens of sanitation work. In Lahore’s Water and Sanitation Authority, 72 per cent of sweepers, 1,609 out of 2,240, are Christians. Within the Lahore Waste Management Company, all 9,000 sweepers are Christians. The label “Isai chora” has long shadowed generations, turning an entire faith group into an occupational category.
In such a landscape, entrepreneurship is not just about business; it becomes an act of reclamation.
That is what The Upper Room Pakistan, founded in 2024 by social innovator Mahrukh Saman Lal, is quietly proving. Based in Lahore, it is Pakistan’s first incubator built for Christian youth, designed to nurture enterprise and restore a sense of dignity long denied.
“We saw Christian innovators standing outside the gates of mainstream incubators,” Lal explains. “Our aim was to build a space where faith and entrepreneurship go hand in hand.”
Unlike the sleek, jargon-heavy incubators that cater to university graduates with investor-ready ideas, The Upper Room begins at the beginning. Many of its participants arrive without polished proposals, only a purpose. Its pre-incubation model trains young people to identify their talents, design small but scalable business models, and connect their work to faith-based values of service and excellence.
For Adrian, a young Christian from Umerkot, that purpose became a production company. “I had no camera, no workspace, just a vision,” he says. “Through The Upper Room, I learned to move forward with what I had.” Today, his venture ARK Productions tells stories rooted in hope and transformation.
Another graduate, Abneer, launched a digital media initiative. “We didn’t just grow professionally; we found a family,” he says. “The Upper Room gave me a safe space to dream boldly as a Christian in Pakistan.”
In a country where religious identity has too often dictated destiny, The Upper Room Pakistan is quietly rewriting the script: from sweeping streets to building start-ups, from being boxed in to breaking out
What distinguishes The Upper Room is that it rejects the separation of professional growth and spiritual life. Mornings begin with reflection and prayer, followed by sessions on entrepreneurship and design thinking. The ethos is simple but radical: excellence itself is a form of worship.
This spiritual-vocational blend fills a gap left by Pakistan’s broader innovation ecosystem, which remains largely inaccessible to marginalised groups. The country’s celebrated incubators, Plan 9, NIC Lahore, and Takhleeq, operate in an English-speaking, middle-class bubble. For Christian youth educated in missionary schools or government colleges, those spaces can feel alien. The Upper Room’s approach is contextual, accessible, and empathetic, traits that mainstream models often overlook.
Its mentorship network includes professionals from Euphoria XR, a tech company that itself rose through Plan 9. Ali Ahmed, Euphoria’s CEO, admits that collaborating with a faith-based incubator was initially unfamiliar territory: “But after meeting the students, I saw something remarkable: these young people were driven by a deep passion to change the world and boldly embrace their identity.”
The deeper story, however, is not about innovation hubs; it’s about resistance through self-definition. For many Christians, changing one’s name to avoid bias in job markets has been an unfortunate rite of passage. Entrepreneurship, in that sense, becomes an assertion of identity rather than a retreat from it. “Even when you haven’t been called chora, you carry its weight,” one participant said. “Starting a business is one way to lay it down.”
The Upper Room’s graduates now run six start-ups that range from media work to product design and community services. Most remain small, but the impact is disproportionate to scale. The participants speak not only of income, but of confidence. “I was looking for clarity and found it,” one participant shared. “Now I can say I don’t need to hide my faith to work well.”
Still, the model’s success raises larger questions for Pakistan’s development landscape. Why has the country’s innovation sector been celebrated in policy documents and donor reports, so rarely included in marginalised communities? Why has inclusivity remained rhetorical, dependent on token representation rather than structural change?
Projects like The Upper Room expose that blind spot. They show that empowerment cannot be outsourced to charity or symbolism. It requires re-imagining the very definitions of entrepreneurship, innovation, and merit.
There is also a lesson for faith-based communities themselves. Historically, Christian social work in Pakistan has focused on education, healthcare, and service delivery, noble but limited domains. Economic independence has rarely been central to the agenda. By turning business into a vocation of faith, The Upper Room invites a shift in how religious minorities imagine their future: not as dependents seeking protection, but as producers claiming space.
For Lal, the founder, the vision is not sectarian. “We are building businesses that serve the whole market, not just our community,” she says. “But we do so from a place of faith and freedom.”
As Pakistan’s economic crisis deepens and young people struggle for work, initiatives like this suggest that answers might come not only from policy rooms and donor roundtables but from small faith-rooted spaces where people are taught to dream again.
In a country where religious identity has too often dictated destiny, The Upper Room Pakistan is quietly rewriting the script: from sweeping streets to building start-ups, from being boxed in to breaking out.
“God doesn’t build within boxes,” one graduate said. “Faith isn’t about control, it’s about movement.”