Interminable queues, impenetrable paperwork, unpronounceable German words -- the hurdles for any newcomer to Europe’s top economy can be daunting but now there’s an app for that, says a team of enterprising Syrian refugees.
It’s called Bureaucrazy. The team is made up of six budding programmers from Berlin’s ReDI School of Digital Integration, a non-profit organisation that trains refugees in coding and entrepreneurship. 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’s a permission for staying in an apartment or hotel” at state expense, said one of the developers, 30-year-old Omar Alshafai.
Alshafai’s teammate Ghaith Zamrik, a 19-year-old from the war-ravaged Syrian capital, arrived in Berlin last Christmas Day. Just two months later, he was enrolled at the ReDI school.
But 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. 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.
The team started work in February and by early June had a successful demonstration at Berlin’s Startup Europe Summit.
Anne Kjaer Riechert, the CEO and co-founder of ReDI, noted 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.
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.
A recent study by the Bertelsmann Foundation found that the number of jobs created by companies started by migrants shot up by more than one-third to 1.3 million between 2005 and 2014, while the number of entrepreneurs with foreign roots rose by one-quarter to 709,000.
Alshafai and Zamrik said that beyond launching a business venture, they wanted to show that with a bit of hard work and ingenuity, refugees could more than pull their weight in German society.
