Tur an Tur - Digitalfabrik gGmbH (Project Integreat)

When thousands of refugees came to Germany every week in 2015, we provided the city of Augsburg with a multilingual information app to provide understandable advice and assistance for the newcomers: Integreat. 

We have replicated this in every sixth German municipality since. Each of these 70+ implementations were collaborative projects from the municipal government, local integration institutions and us as technology and knowledge experts. Information transparency has always been important but has been put on display during the pandemic even more. Reports and studies show migrants being more heavily affected. While poverty is the root of worse health, not having understandable information is considered to play a crucial role, where Integreat brings relief. 

While Integreat is an established solution in local integration efforts and growing its coverage with new municipal partners continuously, its impact stops at German borders. Although there has been interest from cities and organizations abroad, only one pilot project in Sydney has started. 

Integreat is open source and easily scalable. Others could set up their own integration platform with some technological knowledge or collaborate with us. If I was selected as a winner, we would take on the challenge to diminish information poverty for newcomers worldwide.

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 digitization could hold potential to support people who are marginalized by society. 

With my exposure to the “regular” economy before, I was convinced that our market system would just not allocate resources to support marginalized groups accordingly but focus on the purchase power mainstream. 

What I have learnt about myself that I always felt for the less privileged. I was a lot more privileged than many but among my peers the one whose family was struggling. It took me time to not only chase money but invest my given ability to challenge discriminating systems and change lives while also earning a good living. 

I am no specialist, rather a uniter between teams within our organization and to partners outside. While doing this I try to transport our core values of inclusivity and transparency to create change for the most marginalized.

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. As a solution we developed a digital integration platform and launched it in November 2015: the Integreat-App. 

Integreat enables municipal administrations and aid organizations to collect all relevant local information about processes, services, contacts, events and points of interest in an easy-to-use system and push it out to refugees and migrants via the Integreat-App. Our scalable open-source platform has been implemented in over 70 of Germany’s 401 municipalities. 

Worldwide 79.5 Million people are forcibly displaced, Germany has taken in almost 2 million over the past five years. While Integreat is the heart and center of our organization, we have launched a white label solution to support refugees in larger accommodation facilities in Germany (https://malteapp.de/), started to install network infrastructure in refugee housing projects to provide internet connectivity and are developing the Lunes app to support language learning during vocational training (https://lunes.app). 

Integreat is not a digital project to revolutionize the support system for refugees and migrants. Integreat is supposed to work as the centerpiece of a puzzle connecting governments, organizations and newcomers through a low-level digital solution. 

We take great pride in the software quality of our innovations but understand that it takes more than ‘just an app’ to make a sustainable impact. We seek partnerships and collaborations in all our projects. We develop everything open source which is not new but still in a niche but carries so much potential as solutions can be replicated in new places or for new target audiences both independently from or collaboratively with the original innovators. 

We took the open-source approach to our organization as a whole. We are highly transparent on all of our activities, including our books in our annual impact reports. In doing so, we want to lead by example and share our knowledge so others may follow. 

We aim to direct our activities to challenge and change systems. With Integreat we are able to overcome competitive thinking between integration institutions and also municipalities who are now sharing expertise, advice and ideas in one collaborative project: Integreat.

Integreat facilitates the information transfer to newcomers in 70 of Germany’s 401 municipalities. As Integreat was developed with a privacy-by-design approach very few usage numbers are gathered as Integreat’s users include some of the most vulnerable groups. We can state that Integreat was accessed over 650,000 times last year while multiple page visits or offline usage were not even tracked. 

Integreat’s implementation partners - municipal administrations and other local institutions - gain a transparent overview of all offers within their jurisdiction, can remove redundancies and fill gaps. Almost always the local Integreat implementation leads to the first transparent overview which is sustainable and adaptable over time. 

Integreat’s municipal partners are also impacted in a more indirect way and also benefit from more municipalities implementing Integreat as the community for knowledge exchange grows and more reusable content and translations are produced. Information poverty is omnipresent for refugees and migrants wherever they live. Recent interest has been gathered from the World Food Programme in Lebanon, the city of Rotterdam and the Department of Home Affairs from Australia. Only in Australia a pilot implementation is slowly starting. It is tough to see this problem but not any or our solution put into place.