Every summer, when school gates close and the UAE heat climbs, a lot of parents face the same question: what do you do with children who suddenly have six weeks and nowhere to put their energy. HARAKA’s answer, working alongside ADEK, was a multi-sport summer camp hosted at Masdar City, and it’s one of the projects on our portfolio we’re genuinely proud of because of how much ground it covered in a single week…
The idea was straightforward. Take a group of children, give them a base at Masdar City, and fill the days with sport and skill development rather than screens. On HARAKA’s portfolio we describe the venue as a hub of activities and skill development throughout the week, and that’s exactly how it played out on the ground. Masdar City gave us the space to move between different sports and settings without children feeling like they were stuck doing the same thing on repeat, which matters more than people think when you’re running a camp for young kids across several days.
The sports list itself was deliberately varied. Rugby and football gave the group the team sports they already recognise and love, the ones with clear rules and an obvious way to keep score. Athletics brought in a different kind of challenge, more individual, more about personal improvement than beating the kid next to you. Gymnastics asked for balance and control in a way ball sports don’t, and it’s often where you see children surprise themselves with what their bodies can do. Ultimate frisbee and dodgeball rounded things out with pace and unpredictability, the sort of games that get even reluctant kids running around without them quite realising they’re doing exercise.
Working with ADEK meant this camp sat within an education framework rather than being a straightforward holiday activity programme. That distinction matters. A camp built with an education authority in mind has to think about more than keeping children entertained for a few hours. It has to consider development, safety, structure and how a week of sport actually leaves a child better off than when they started, whether that’s a new skill, more confidence, or just a better relationship with being active. Our coaches went into each session with that in mind, adjusting pace and difficulty depending on the group in front of them rather than running a fixed script regardless of who turned up.
What struck us most, running this one, was how naturally the different sports fed into each other across the week. A child who found gymnastics hard on day one might turn out to be the fastest in athletics on day three, and that shift in confidence tends to carry across every other activity they try afterwards. Dodgeball and ultimate frisbee are brilliant for that too, because they don’t reward the same skills as football or rugby, so children who don’t usually get picked first suddenly find themselves doing well.
This camp falls under our Active Youth Holiday Camps service, which is one of the six core services we run at HARAKA, and it’s a good example of why that service exists in the first place. Partnering with a body like ADEK also connects to our School Outreach work, where we go into schools directly rather than waiting for children to come to us. Different route, same underlying goal: get kids moving, and make it something they actually look forward to.
HARAKA is an Abu Dhabi based wellbeing company, and we’ve been running programmes like this for a good while now. Our flagship gym is at the International Tennis Centre in Zayed Sports City, but the honest truth is that a lot of our best work happens away from that building entirely, in schools, at corporate offices, and at venues across the city where we’ve been asked to bring the energy rather than wait for people to bring themselves to us.
Active Youth Holiday Camps is one of our six core services, alongside Gym & Physical Wellness, Employee Wellbeing, Team Building, Events Management and School Outreach, and it’s one we’ve run for over a decade now, at venues including Emirates Palace, EXPO City Dubai and Zayed Sports City. The Masdar City camp with ADEK sits comfortably in that history. Across the years we’ve learned that children don’t want a camp that’s all sport, all the time, any more than they want one that’s all crafts. The camps that work best mix things up properly: sport sessions alongside arts and crafts, scavenger hunts, talent shows, a trip to ten-pin bowling or ice skating thrown in to break the pattern. It’s that balance of fun, learning and activity that keeps kids engaged for a full week rather than counting down the days.
Wellness at HARAKA has never meant just gym memberships and personal training, though that’s certainly part of it. It means thinking about wellbeing across a person’s whole week, whether that person is a six-year-old at a summer camp, an office worker whose company has asked us in for an employee wellbeing programme, or a school group taking part in one of our outreach visits. We work with individuals, corporate teams, schools and government entities right across the UAE, and camps like this one are often where that work starts, because a child who has a good experience with sport at eight is a lot more likely to still value moving their body at eighteen.
As a wellbeing company Abu Dhabi families and organisations have come to rely on for these kinds of community activations Abu Dhabi projects tend to need more of every summer, not less. If you’re a school, a government entity or simply curious about what an Active Youth Holiday Camp with HARAKA could look like for your community, get in touch with us and we’ll talk through what we could build together.
Written by Rensché Graham Corporate Wellness Manager, HARAKA, October 2026
Reviewed by Sam Bolger, Managing Partner, HARAKA, October 2026