Integreat

Back in 2015 when we laid the groundwork for our today’s non-profit, integration of refugees was the biggest issue of them all. I found a lot of purpose in what we were doing and came to understand how valuable reducing information poverty for newcomers really was. Collaborating with social departments of cities and other NGOs led me to explore how digitisation could hold potential to support people who are marginalised by society. 

With my exposure to the “regular” economy in my early years I was aware that our market system would just not allocate resources to support marginalised groups accordingly but focus on the purchase power mainstream. After we, our team of 10 employees and 15 volunteers, were able to develop Integreat as the biggest information platform for newcomers in Germany, I am confident that we have what it takes to tackle lacks in social systems both nationally and internationally.

Refugees and migrants arriving in any new country face a significant challenge understanding local processes, support programs and the culture as a whole. Even if the local integration ‘infrastructure’ such as counselling services and support programs are offered they are not known fully by potential beneficiaries. In 2015, in a collaborative effort with local integration experts, local institutions and the municipal administration of the city of Augsburg we developed a digital integration platform and launched it in November 2015: the Integreat-App. 

Integreat enables municipal administrations and aid organization to collect all relevant local information about processes, services, contacts, events and points of interest in an easy to use system und push it out to refugees and migrants via the Integreat-App. Our scalable open source platform has been implemented in 63 of Germany’s 401 municipalities, started a pilot in Sydney and Kampala and shall diminish information poverty everywhere it is needed.

According to the UNHCR, 26 million refugees, 4.2 million asylum-seekers and 3.6 million displaced Venezuelans were adding to the 46 internally displaced people worldwide by the end of 2019. In Germany alone, more than 1.5 million have applied for asylum since 2015. The integration of these refugees in the country of arrival is a difficult process. It takes between 7 and 10 years from the arrival to their integration into the labour market. Canadian studies have shown that in this integration phase a lack of information increases social exclusion and the participation in educational and cultural activities is significantly prevented. The problem of obtaining information is not so much that information is not available at all as that it is not accessible to the heterogeneous target group of refugees. Information is often too complex, not centralised, not trustworthy and not accessible without barriers. This informational challenge slows down the process of integration tremendously. An additional problem is that in many regional authorities it is not transparent what offers there are for refugees because they are decentrally organised: by individuals, NGOs, voluntary initiatives, and of course by the local government.

One of the most powerful tools to succeed in today’ world is information – specifically trustworthy and understandable information. One certain group of people who are not enabled to thrive in the digital, information age are the ones who are precluded due to a language barrier which is in place in each country – refugees and migrants. 

Integreat is an information platform for refugees and migrants where local integration experts gather all their expertise in a central platform, translate this unique content und publish it via a free smartphone app to refugees and migrants. Integreat is implemented in 63 of Germany’s 401 municipalities where the local government provides our platform, brings all experts together and launches their own Integreat-App. All municipalities use the same platform developed by our non-profit which can easily scale and adapt to local needs and different environments.

While Germany is Europe’s biggest immigration destination and the 5th biggest refugee hosting country of the world, Integreat can deliver its impact worldwide to support refugees and migrants in building a new livelihood in their new home country. Pilot projects in Sydney and Kampala to scale Integreat have recently been launched.

Integreat was initially built to support the city of Augsburg with a rising number of refugees arriving in the city in the summer of 2015. The city administration was facing the challenge of providing them with the most important information about processes, counselling services and their asylum procedure. Integreat was able to support the city and local social organisation to gather all necessary information and easily translate it. The municipalities also gain a transparent overview of all offers and services, enabling them to identify gaps and redundancies in their support system. 

Since Integreat’s pilot cities came to understand that information poverty is not only faced by refugees but all other migrants as well. Information and new languages were added to provide all newcomers with understandable information. 

With each local Integreat implementation thousands of refugees and migrants will find an understandable and complete overview of their rights, local processes, support services and contacts for the very first time in order to make well-informed decisions based on this information.

Digitisation is the the gold rush of the 21st century but with the mechanisms of our current markets the most marginalised will not profit from these developments. It will need specific projects who are making use of the tools developed during this gold rush and use them to elevate those who are traditionally left behind. Integreat has chosen to do this. A large development community was established using open source software and frameworks, developed and used by some of the largest digital companies to build digital bridges between refugees and migrants and host societies to overcome information gaps.

The years 2015 and 2016 marked the latest greater refugee movement to Germany as 1.5 million refugees arrived. The city of Augsburg welcomed up to one hundred refugees every week at that time. Augsburg is also the home of the association ‘Tür an Tür’ who have supported refugees and migrants building a new livelihood in the region since its founding in 1992. They not only built a counselling centre in Augsburg where Germany’s great welfare organisations such as the Red Cross, Caritas and Diakonie would join forces but also published the ‘First Steps’ brochure in 1999 in which local information, contacts and advise were provided in various languages to asylum seekers. A major reason for discontinuing the brochure was the inability to keep up with the quickly changing integration-related issues both on local and national level. 

In a joint meeting of our group of volunteers with actors from the city and NGOs in 2015 it became evident what might support refugees in their daily life: a digital tool gathering all local information in multiple languages which could be created and updated by the city and NGOs themselves and accessed directly via smartphones from refugees and migrants: Integreat.

Born into one of the safest places in the world it took me 25 years to learn that I have already won the lottery, with the education I received and the life my mother offered to my sister and me, and it was up to me what I would do with it. In 2015, right in the middle of my master’s degree in Finance & Information management, the most recent great refugee movement to Germany and Europe was peaking. This was also the time in my life where I learned to honestly reflect on my completed apprenticeship, Bachelor’s degree and consultant internship coming to a conclusion how little and misdirected my impact was. I joined forces with other students to build an information app for refugees coming to Germany: Integreat. 

From this point on I was thriving as I was contributing my skills to build a non-profit company around it which would make the opportunities of digitisation available to the most marginalised people. I am now impacting thousands of refugees and migrants and am leading a small but growing non-profit of young people facilitating their unique skills towards an incredible impact.

Integreat was developed by a team of volunteers, most of them students, during the summer of 2015 resulting in the successful launch of Integreat in Augsburg a four months later. Until today, three of the founding members are still part of the Integreat project. These are Daniel Kehne who has been the project coordinator from the start, Sven Seeberg who has started off as a backend developer and now also is the CTO and Fritjof Knier who lead the city support team in Germany and has since moved on to coordinate the international efforts of Integreat. Daniel and Fritjof are the managing directors of the social enterprise behind Integreat. Additionally, Integreat has a diverse team with both technical and organisational skills. With this team in place Integreat does not have to rely on outside sources, e.g. software development freelancers, to fulfil its mission. 

Integreat is still closely connected to its roots as a volunteering project. Currently 12 employees in different variations of part-time structures work together with around 15 volunteers. Major decision processes are taken together during four development conferences held at TU Munich per year. This organisational structure of ‘Community Engagement’ has proven to be a key success factor of Integreat as it constantly allows new, often young people and newcomers with developing language skills, to join the project at an individually adaptable speed. 

This wide volunteer base is also a great source of employees for our non-profit as many look back on a volunteer start at Integreat.

Asking the long-time team members and the coordinators from the project they would all agree that Integreat really has embodied the mantra ‘if you want to go far, go together’. The togetherness and community-driven decision making led the project to where it is now - on the brink to scale its impact internationally. The most crucial part of this development and really a turning point was the first year after Integreat was piloted.

During a time where many projects were founded to support refugees arriving in the various countries of the European Union, Integreat was not the only project to provide comprehensive information for refugees but 5 years later we are one of the few not only to still be operating but having increased its impact since. The way we did it, was to take on somewhat of start-up-approach to the challenge of diminishing information poverty for refugees and migrants. 

Although making the business a non-profit, the change from a voluntary, common good project to a cost-covering business was viewed critically by  some (municipal) partners and founding project members at first. However, with the transparent approach of our business we have been able to make this transition successfully. 

As the previous answers have already shown, the greatest achievement in the leadership of the Integreat project was to enable each individual to feel responsible for the project and build a culture where all these voices are heard and listened to. Leadership within Integreat has been divided among different people and has been all about moderating opinions, empowering young people and setting everybody and therefore the project up for success. In doing so we were able to make the transition towards a sustainable non-profit organization which will be able to support the most marginalized with open, digital innovations in the upcoming years.

Integreat combines three technical components in order to build a digital bridge between newcomers´ smartphones, counsellors’ expertise and local municipalities: An easy-to-use Content Management System, a multi-lingual Smartphone-App and a clear Web-App. The unique quality of the project is that all actors involved contribute within their expertise. Local information is provided by integration experts and municipal administrations on site which the CMS enables them to do.

The technical development is centralized within our non-profit Tür an Tür - Digitalfabrik. All municipalities use the same platform which can easily scale and adapt to local needs and different environments. This information is automatically pushed out to the Integreat-App for iOS and Android and the Integreat-Web-App (http://integreat.app). The Smartphone-App offers offline-availability in times of no data plan or connectivity while the Web-App makes information findable by search engines heavily promoting information transparency. 

We have brought in technology which can be used immediately by beneficiaries and service providers/customers. Smartphones are the most common digital device owned by everyone, including migrants and refugees who can access the information on Integreat. Municipalities, usually way behind in digital advancement, can access the backend via their browser and are able to use this new digital tool with neglectable digital skills. Automated services such as AI translations or interfaces to other digital platforms are implemented by us making them accessible for our users. 

To top everything off Integreat is fully open source, content is creative commons licensed and workflows openly documented in our own Integreat-wiki. 

Integration of refugees and migrants into society takes approximately seven to 10 years and is often obstructed by cultural and linguistic barriers. The lack of reliable, accessible and easy-to-understand information leads to social exclusion and delays the process of integration. Integreat addresses this with digital resources, available on a smartphone app, website and printable materials, providing centralised, up-to-date and multilingual information to support migrants as they adapt to their new life. 

Tür an Tür - Digitalfabrik, the non-profit home of the Integreat project, provides the Integreat platform to municipal administrations who reach out to local aid organisations, integration experts and representatives of refugee and migrant communities. We support this local network with workshops and training enabling them handle the platform and gather all locally integration-relevant content. This content is then translated and automatically pushed out to the Integreat-App which can be easily accessed by refugees and migrants representing the output of Integreat in the ToC. 

Personnel in the municipal integration work are capable of collecting local information and preparing it for newcomers in a target group-oriented way and are aware of the significance of information transparency. Newcomers take advantage of information offers and can identify trustworthy information correctly. Personnel in the municipal integration work cooperate in the creation of a uniform information platform while newcomers are actively involved in the creation process. Digital bridges for newcomers have been built at the municipal level. This is the outcome level of our ToC and which Integreat has reached in some municipalities and is still aiming at in others. Since each Integreat implementation happens on a local level they differ heavily in their speed and perceived success due to various reasons. 

In order to reach this level in all Integreat municipalities, we bring together representatives from all of them once a year to share best practices and connect them to each other so that they can help themselves in building digital bridges. 

The impact level of our ToC is that Integreat has been a piece to the puzzle that information poverty is no longer a cause of inequality of opportunity for newcomers. 

https://tuerantuer.de/digitalfabrik/publikationen/

Looking at the numbers, Integreat is already available in every 7th municipality in Germany (63 out 401). Integreat’s content has been accessed 300,000 times in the past 12 months, not counting offline-usage from the Integreat-app. What this number can be benchmarked against is almost zero as there were almost no way to find or understand this information before. 

More than 400 content creators in municipal administrations and aid organizations are gathering content as they learn about their support of newcomers through the first transparent overview of all services in Integreat and understand the power of open source software and collaborative work across municipal borders. 

The ambitious but realistic goal for our national efforts are to double all number within the next 5 years. What we really want to focus on in addition to that is to lay the foundation for Integreat to support refugees, migrants, aid organizations and municipal administrations to better communicate with each other in other countries and continents.

 As the UNHCR measures displaced people in millions, this is the scale Integreat needs to work at as well.

Germany is currently the largest refugee hosting country in Europe and the fifth largest of the world. Historically Germany has also been a destination of migrants from Europe and beyond which is why Integreat has such a huge target audience nationally but Integreat was built to work all over the world because information poverty is faced by newcomers everywhere. Recently, the first Integreat implementation outside of Germany was started in Sydney for refugees arriving through the UNHCR Resettlement Program and the organisation supporting refugees in the third-largest refugee hosting country in Uganda have shown interest as well. 

Despite this extraordinary times we aim at having Integreat piloted outside of Germany for the first time within a year. 

We believe that Integreat can be an important building block in different settings in different countries to support refugees and migrants by bringing together supporting organisations in a collaborative project bringing a local Integreat project to life. We aim at reducing information poverty to newcomers to support social inclusion and the build-up of new livelihoods to bring relief to the oftentimes most marginalised people. On this way Integreat may even be able to make support and integration efforts more efficient, cost-efficient and complete by the nature of how Integreat works - as an open, transparent and successful-by-collaboration local project. So, the long-term goal is to bring Integreat to many more countries, tough to say how many within the next 5 years but we will just constantly try to expand the reach of Integreat. 

A very new barrier for Integreat’s vision to diminish information poverty at a larger scale in Germany is the uncertainty of municipal budgets after the economic downturn of the corona crisis. But this uncertainty is not limited to Germany, so the goal to bring Integreat to places outside of Germany may face a steeper challenge to secure seed funding. 

Independently from this extraordinary times the biggest challenge or barrier is the understanding of the local landscape and responsibilities in the field of integration in another country to define a strategy to scale Integreat successfully.

After gaining an understanding of the landscape a decision whether Integreat would need an intermediary organisation on a national level or is capable of managing the local implementations from the German headquarters needs to be taken. Integreat’s first scaling approaches in Sydney and Kampala both rely on a local NGO to take over communication and implementation support on site. For each country this barrier of successfully launching a pilot is the biggest one. While scaling from that pilot is not simple it only becomes easier after that.

In most cases we will invest as much time in finding an implementation partner in a new country who can fulfill the role we take over in Germany to train and enable municipal administrations and aid organizations to use the Integreat platform. 

As this process takes a lot of time it is necessary to have a bigger portion of our time dedicated for building this relationships to partner organizations. Researching potential partners takes time again and creating enough visibility to be found as it happened with our partner in Australia and Uganda is time-consuming as well. 

While our software is as scale-ready as it can be it really is the lack of capacities we are missing at the moment. Finding some funding to support these efforts for 2 to 3 years to push this efforts heavily seems like the most promising measure at the moment.

On a national level Integreat’s key partners are municipal administrations as they are the key implementing partners for Integreat who coordinate the involvement of other local institutions and organizations. 

One of the key partners to promote Integreat’s vision outside of Germany has been the worldwide network of refugee and integration-related technology innovations assembled in the network “Techfugees”. Network members have already and will be important partners to gain an understanding of the integration sectors in the designated countries. 

The Technical University of Munich has been frequently managed in this proposal already. It has not only played a key role in Integreat’s development so far but has opened up an avenue into the research world by its presence in its own research. These contacts have led to last years’ promising kick-off week of Integreat in Sydney where service providers, government representatives and refugees were brought together to present this innovation and develop a plan for implementation. 

City networks could also play a major role to have some statements of interest at first and eventually some highly visible pilots in other countries to kick-start a similar journey as Integreat has gone on in Germany. Integreat has been recently invited to be part of a workshop of ‘ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability” (https://www.iclei.org/) and a while longer ago to present Integreat to a study visit of ‘Integrating Cities’ (partnership of Eurocities and the European Commision) in Munich. These networks might contain potential candidates for first Integreat-pilots outside of Germany.

Integreat eases the integration-related efforts of municipal administration and local aid organizations. Till today information were published via brochures and flyers which had to be printed over and over again. Integreat offers a low-cost opportunity to streamline the flow of information from institutions and organizations to newcomers. 

Integreat has worked towards to be mainly financed by its own revenues in 2020 but at the very beginning Integreat was as a voluntary project. After a successful pilot launch and other cities started showing interest, a new non-profit enterprise was founded in 2016 to give Integreat an organizational foundation: the Tür an Tür - Digitalfabrik gGmbH. From mid 2016 until 2018 Integreat received public funding from the German Ministry for Labour and Social Affairs and simultaneously rolled out a revenue model where municipalities implementing Integreat in cooperation with us paid a yearly fee. Depending on the size of the municipality the yearly fee is between 4,000 and 7,000 $. 

The alternative to a cooperation contract with our NGO is for each municipality to host the open source solution themselves which nobody has opted for yet as their personal costs would be higher than cooperating with our non-profit. 

As already mentioned Integreat received some initial funding to hire two part-time employees mostly to organise the voluntary project team. After this funding ran out in 2018 it was the goal to become more independent from public or private funding because it was possible with revenues from each municipality to cover our budget. What helped us do this was the reception of approximately  280,000 $ in prize money from the Google.org impact challenge in 2018 which was used to invest into new employees and work towards making Integreat a cost-covering project. While that prize money had to cover an operational loss of 100,000 $ last year, Integreat will be cost-covering by December 2020 or a little bit after that. 

For our vision to bring Integreat to countries and continents outside of Germany we aim to secure some funding which would help us to create successful pilot projects in close collaboration with organizations in those countries who could maintain and grow abroad long-term which would enable us to pull out of those countries again and instead build a network of various organizations across different countries.

Revenues from own activities: approximately 200,000 $ in the past 12 months

Google.org grant from 2018: approximately 280,000 $ total one-time-payment (used to cover operating expenses until cost-covering revenues are reached) 

Public grant funding from German Ministry for Social Affairs from mid 2016 to 2018: approximately 180,000 $ total spread over 2.5 years

Integreat’s international efforts could use a grant for 1.5 or 2 full-time positions for a three-year span which would add up to around 340,000 $ in total over that time-span. 

We expect our budget in 2020 to be around 270,000 $. 

225,000 $ equalling over 80 % are invested in personnel which is always our goal as this directly translates to improvement of Integreat. Other costs are traveling costs for workshops in municipalities and investments for a local project in Augsburg where we provide internet infrastructure for refugee and homeless accommodations.

As already mentioned in that referenced question, having the financial resources to put a real focus on building international partnerships to scale Integreat internationally is what is missing for us. But the Elevate Prize can probably provide more than just financial support as it will create high visibility and access to a network of organizations who might be potential implementation partners for Integreat abroad. 

Back when Integreat won the Google.org Impact Challenge in Germany it was a crucial financial injection but the contacts in the aftermath of the prize were just as important as it opened up many doors in politics and bigger NGOs resulting in new projects where we participate to support the most marginalized. 

Funding and a revenue model needs to be evaluated for each new country Integreat would enter. Even if we were to prefer to have a local organization handle the in-country support, we would still try to support them with building a sustainable financial foundation. 

Monitoring and evaluation are always crucial. We are very fortunate to have the Chair for Information Systems at TU Munich as close partner to do research and a collaboration with the poverty action lab is planned, this would be crucial to be replicated outside of Germany again. 

As previously mentioned marketing and exposure to be found by potential partners is starting to work for us but still has a lot of room to grow. We would put the highest priority on this.

One of the most important partners would be the UNHCR as they have the highest number of people on the ground in the countries where Integreat could have a huge impact. There will not be many Integreat implementations where the UNHCR would not be a partner providing content or even leading the implementation. 

The real crucial part of bringing Integreat to life locally is to offer various languages to inform as many newcomers as possible. Translators without borders would be a very interesting partner as advisors on how to build good translation workflows in different countries. While this process in Germany is very formal with professional and certified translation agencies it will differ heavily in Australia and again in Uganda. Getting advice from professional, local translators would be incredible helpful.