Sweden

Gatans Lag

Gatans Lag is a football organisation that uses football as a tool to beat homelessness, addiction, and other types of social exclusion through football. They create motivation and energy within the players for them to be able to change their own life situation.

Gatans Lag became members of the Swedish Football Association in September 2012. Today, they run football training sessions in five cities across Sweden.

ORGANISATION DETAILS

PARTICIPANTS

Adult men and women affected by homelessness, substance abuse, and other forms of social exclusion.

LOCATIONS

Stockholm, Vasteras, Gothenburg, Helsingborg, and Lund.

Country statistics

7 out of 189 in Human Development Index rating
(UNDP, 2019)

$54,050 Average annual salary per person (World Bank, 2021)

17.1% of population live under the national poverty line (UNDP, 2019)

Sweden has a population of 10.26 million, with 88.2% living in urbanised areas. Most Swedes live in the south, but population clusters are found along the Baltic coast in the east, while the anterior areas of the north remain sparsely populated.

The capital city, Stockholm, has a population of 1.657 million. Sweden is known for having free-market capitalism and extensive welfare benefits. That being said, there are still economic challenges to provide affordable housing and successfully integrating migrants into the labour force (CIA Factbook, 2020)

Youth unemployment, between the ages of 15-24, sits at 24%, while the general unemployment rate is 6.78%. As of 2020 there were 50,414 stateless people in Sweden (CIA World Factbook, 2020). In 2020, Sweden also reported 12,991 registered asylum seekers, most coming from Syria, Uzbekistan, and Iraq (UNHCR, 2021)

Housing prices having increased homelessness significantly, and although there are more houses being built, they are not affordable (Borgen Project, 2020). The estimated number of homeless people in Sweden in 2020 was 33,000 (Stadsmissionen, 2021).