Interminable lines, impenetrable paperwork, unpronounceable German words — the hurdles for any newcomer to Europe’s top economy can be daunting, but now there is an app for that, a team of enterprising Syrian refugees said.
It is called Bureaucrazy, after the often Kafkaesque process of getting housing, healthcare and a bank account, not to mention seeking asylum.
The team is made up of six budding programmers from Berlin’s ReDI School of Digital Integration, a non-profit organization that trains refugees in coding and entrepreneurship.
Photo: AFP
Its first class started in February with 42 students, of whom 35 were awarded diplomas in June.
“I was shocked by the long waits in line and when I first arrived, I waited two weeks for a paper called “Kostenuebernahme” — it is a permission for staying in an apartment or hotel at state expense,” said one of the developers, 30-year-old Omar Alshafai.
“Also when I signed the paper — it was in German — we didn’t know what we were signing,” said Alshafai, who came from Damascus in April last year.
The thicket of red tape facing Germany’s refugees was highlighted last month by a Chinese backpacker who made global headlines after he accidentally signed an application for asylum when he lost his wallet.
He was only able to sort out the mistake and retrieve his passport after 12 days in a refugee shelter.
Alshafai’s teammate Ghaith Zamrik, a 19-year-old from the war-ravaged Syrian capital, arrived in Berlin on Christmas Day last year.
Just two months later, he was enrolled at the ReDI school.
“At the first session we were doing some brainstorming — we were discussing what problems we had and how technology could solve these problems,” he said.
“We had two main issues, the first was the language and the other was bureaucracy because we couldn’t understand it, how the system works here,” he said.
However, while the market was flooded with translation apps, the team saw a potentially huge audience for technology that could offer downloads of required documents, map the locations of relevant offices and address frequently asked questions.
The pair howled in mock pain as they recalled the German tongue-twisters necessary to open doors, with “Mietschuldenfreiheitsbescheinigung” (proof that you don’t own rent for a previous apartment) among the most devilish.
Even Germans they asked for help were often bewildered by the jargon of official correspondence, making their app a potential godsend for more than just asylum seekers.
“We’re hoping to also help all the migrants, or anybody who comes new to Germany, with the bureaucratic system,” Zamrik said.
The team started work in February and by early June had a successful demonstration at Berlin’s Startup Europe Summit.
Anne Kjaer Riechert, the chief executive officer and cofounder of ReDI, said Germany had an estimated 43,000 unfilled jobs in the IT sector and that refugees represented untapped potential.
The Bureaucrazy team “had no previous experience in any kind of coding, but of course they are what I would call extreme users when it comes to mobile technology because the smartphone has really been a lifeline for many of them while fleeing including as a tool for navigation and reconnecting with family on the migrant trail,” she said.
While Alshafai is a trained electrical engineer, he had initially been hired at automaker Mercedes-Benz as an intern on the factory floor.
Now ReDI is working with established companies like Mercedes to place qualified asylum seekers in their innovation departments.
“I firmly believe it is more profitable for everybody in the long term when we can support newcomers like Omar to help develop ideas for Mercedes’ future digital retail spaces instead of having him work on the assembly line,” she said.
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