At 18, Jan van Hövell introduced a soccer ball to the Buduburam refugee camp in Ghana throughout a 2004 internship with the UN Refugee Company. He mentioned it was a horrible system, only one ball from one intern, and 1000’s of children with nothing to do.
“I used to be the one bringing my soccer, and we might play, and we might join, and we might have good instances,” he says. “However I used to be additionally the one bringing my soccer, and I believed this couldn’t be the answer.”
He studied legislation, then spent 5 years in mergers and acquisitions at a prime Amsterdam agency—profitable, prestigious, and utterly fallacious for him. In 2016, he give up and wrote to his contacts at UNHCR, asking: “Are you able to give me an opportunity to go to a refugee camp and work with the group to discover a answer for the shortage of sports activities alternatives in refugee camps?”
The UN mentioned sure. To pay his payments through the startup section, van Hövell moonlighted as knowledgeable DJ at weddings and company occasions whereas constructing what would turn into KLABU, Swahili for “membership,” and formally launched as a basis in 2019. The social enterprise builds sports activities clubhouses inside refugee camps: each is a repurposed transport container outfitted with photo voltaic panels, wifi, a TV display screen, and a music system. Hooked up to it is a sports activities “library” the place residents borrow tools, like soccer balls and volleyball nets, to chess units and trainers, after which return the objects so 1000’s of others can share them.
The typical keep in a refugee camp is 21 years, not two or 5 as how most individuals assume, van Hövell mentioned on the Mews Unfold convention in Amsterdam. “Youngsters are born in refugee camps, they develop up in refugee camps. These are their new properties.” With 120 million forcibly displaced individuals worldwide, the quantity nonetheless rising. Camps present faculties and water, however nearly nothing past survival.
“They want tools, they want balls, they want nets, they want correct clothes. There are faculties, there’s water, however there’s no more than that.”
Sooner than van Hövell anticipated, KLABU now runs 10 clubhouses throughout Kenya, Bangladesh, Jordan, Brazil, and Mauritania. “We now have 10 of those clubhouses, however what drives us each day is that we have now a ready listing of 20,” he mentioned. “We work with the UN and UNHCR, and so they come to us nearly on a weekly foundation, and so they ask us to come back to Mexico, to Uganda, to Zimbabwe, to Malawi. So we have now numerous work to do.”
The size problem is most acute in Bangladesh, house to Cox’s Bazar—the world’s largest refugee camp, housing a couple of million Rohingya. There, KLABU partnered with Paris Saint-Germain to deploy a cell clubhouse that travels by the settlement, as a result of no single mounted location might attain everybody.
Past PSG, the adidas Basis, structure agency MVRDV, hospitality tech firm Mews, and Amsterdam streetwear model Filling Items have all signed on. Mews turned the primary sponsor of KLABU’s latest location in Boa Vista, Brazil, house to Latin America’s largest shelter for indigenous Venezuelan refugees.
A part of the funding mannequin entails designing and promoting sportswear globally, that are additionally worn within the camps.
“As a substitute of them sporting our secondhand Messi shirts, let’s flip the story round,” van Hövell mentioned. “Let’s have their shirt, their membership, so that folks can play the sport.” Every clubhouse will get its personal distinctive badge and package, and 50 % of sportswear income movement to the inspiration, with full industrial self-sufficiency because the long-term purpose.
In March 2026, KLABU launched a membership program at €1 monthly—precisely what it prices to provide one particular person entry to a clubhouse. Van Hövell’s ambition is to surpass Bayern Munich’s 400,000 members to make KLABU the biggest sports activities membership on the planet by headcount. “It’s unbelievable what you are able to do with one euro, to provide those who sense of group,” he mentioned. The 2050 goal is bolder nonetheless: 300 clubhouses reaching two million refugees.
“It brings everybody collectively. It provides that pleasure, that connection that all of us must not hand over, that unbeatable spirit.”
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