Patrice Riemens on Thu, 25 Feb 2016 10:15:31 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> German entrepreneurial spirit to_heal refugees' plight |
original to: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/d0387f48-d635-11e5-829b-8564e7528e54.html A German entrepreneurial spirit to heal refugees’ plight By Guy Chazan, Financial Times, February 22, 2016 A shipping container in Hamburg has become a symbol of how German entrepreneurial talent and technical know-how are combining to help alleviate the refugee crisis. Harald Neidhardt, a Hamburg businessman, and Mirko Bass, an executive at US tech multinational Cisco, converted the 20-foot box into a medical clinic connected by video-link to an army of remote interpreters. It has proved a big hit with doctors treating the thousands of sick and exhausted migrants still pouring into Germany, many of whom urgently need medical care after weeks on the road but who do not speak German. “We asked ourselves what we most needed, and it’s connectivity and language,” says Mr Neidhardt, a shaved-headed serial entrepreneur in red trainers. He is one of many Germans who are harnessing technology to help their country cope with the 1.1m migrants it took in last year. The inflow has placed its social services under huge strain, sown discord in the EU and raised questions over the future of Chancellor Angela Merkel. People like Mr Neidhardt usually start by volunteering time and expertise — part of a national mobilisation that has few precedents in Germany’s recent history. Their ideas are often small-scale, local responses to specific problems. But in many cases they have outgrown their modest beginnings and found enthusiastic backers across the country. One such idea is the Welcome App, pioneered by two small software companies in Dresden. It offers refugees information in Arabic, Farsi and English on everything from Germany’s constitution to the address of their nearest jobcentre. The app started out as an attempt to highlight another side to Dresden, a city that has become notorious for the noisy rallies held by the anti-immigrant movement Pegida. But the app is expanding fast, attracting commercial sponsorship and contributions from municipal budgets. It has spread from Dresden to cover four other cities, including Frankfurt and Munich, and seven towns have signed up. Peggy Reuter-Heinrich, co-head of software developer Heinrich und Reuter Solutions, who helped pioneer the app, has plans to cover all of Germany. “The refugee crisis acted as a big spur for people like me to do something morally useful,” she says. The fact that the app has taken off in such a big way “really surprised me”. However, she still sees it as more of a social enterprise than a moneymaking proposition, and has donated all profits from the app to migrant-related causes. Hanseatic Help has had a similar trajectory. It started off in the corner of an exhibition hall in Hamburg, collecting and handing out old clothes to refugees. It has since grown into a massive logistics operation, with its own supply chain management program — developed by a volunteer with a background in IT. Donated clothes are sorted, packed and entered into a computer system that allocates each one a QR code and a storage space in the organisation’s huge warehouse. With its forklift trucks, pallets and heavy-duty shelving, the store looks more like a fashion outlet than a refugee charity. “We were very lucky that from the start we had volunteers from the logistics industry, as well as management experts who could help us improve the structure of the operation,” says Simone Herrmann, head of Hanseatic Help. She says that as well as handing out items directly, the clothes store has shipped some 2m articles to smaller distribution points throughout Hamburg, and is expanding to service local homeless shelters and other social programmes. It has even transported clothes to refugees in the Greek islands and northern Iraq. The organisation is funded by donations from individuals and companies, and receives no money from the state: it is entirely staffed by unpaid volunteers — some 1,500 work there every day. The container developed by Mr Neidhardt, founder of event and media company MLOVE, and Mr Bass reflects a similar drive. The two men were keen to do something to help the asylum seekers flowing into Hamburg, and combine that with community projects they had worked on together. Mr Neidhardt admits he is somewhat obsessed with containers, which he sees as “raw, ad hoc and mobile”. He has used the structures to create a “future city campus”, an event space in Hamburg’s port area. Their focus narrowed on the medical situation in Hamburg’s refugee reception centres, where they were both volunteering to distribute old clothes. Clinics there had up to four interpreters on hand, at a cost to the city of €225,000 per site a year, yet most of them sat idle for much of the time. Also when it came to refugees from the more far-flung countries such as Eritrea, doctors were often left trying to communicate with hand gestures, broken English and pained facial expressions. So the two men came up with the idea of fitting a container with WiFi and a link to a remote interpreting service. It would be mobile, and so easily deployable to camps that needed it most. Mr Bass put the idea to his bosses at Cisco. “They were hesitant,” he says. “They said we don’t sell containers — what’s the business case?” Disappointed, he posted the idea in the company’s internal chatroom. One of his European managers immediately agreed a budget for a pilot project. Six weeks later, a “refugee first response centre” was installed in a car park of a building supplies market in the west of Hamburg, which is now home to some 1,200 refugees. The two men partnered with SAVD, an interpreting service based in Vienna that has a roster of 700 translators speaking a total of 52 languages. Doctors can summon native speakers of Hausa and Tigrinya at the click of a mouse. Dr Hans-Otto Wagner of the University Medical Centre in Hamburg-Eppendorf, who has used the service, says it has improved the doctor-patient relationship, since “language is the key to communication”. He says it has helped establish whether patients have physical ailments or “whether they are traumatised and need psychological help”. Meanwhile, demand for the first-response centres is growing. A local charity, the Dorit und Alexander Otto Stiftung, donated €900,000 to the city of Hamburg to help acquire 10 more centres, with the city agreeing to cover the running costs. Mr Neidhardt aims to expand the containers into “telemedicine”, so doctors can share X-rays, access specialist services remotely and diagnose ailments by video conference. That would allow the centres to be deployed in remote locations. “My dream is to install these units along the whole migration route, all the way to Lesbos,” he says. [------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------] Refugee aid hacks When it comes to aiding the hundreds of thousands of refugees that have arrived in Europe, it helps that most of them have smartphones. “The first thing they ask for when they arrive — after food and water — is power and WiFi,” says Mike Butcher, a technology writer. Mr Butcher is the driving force behind “Techfugees”, a non-profit venture established last year to co-ordinate the international tech industry’s response to the refugee crisis. The group has organised a conference in London and hackathons in Oslo, Warsaw and Sydney in an effort to generate techie ideas that could help migrants. “It’s a bridge between the creative, wacky world of engineers and hackers, and the rather slower-moving world of the NGOs,” Mr Butcher says. Projects it has backed include the Refugee Aid App, which helps migrants to find food, shelter, legal aid and medical care upon their arrival in Europe: MeshPoint, a rugged WiFi access point that can be set up in any weather conditions: and Migreat, a digital personal assistant to help refugees navigate the asylum application process. It allows them to make an informed decision on where to apply for refugee status by comparing different countries’ rates of approval, rules on the right to work and application-processing times. 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