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For migrants arriving in new countries, the experience can be bewildering. To access public services can be extremely challenging: migrants are often faced with complex and esoteric systems in languages they do not understand. Furthermore, the services they are trying to access have often been designed to fit organisational requirements, rather than citizens’ needs.
“Very, very often procedures related to administrative services do not provide information in a very complete and clear way, or, if they do, not in a way that addresses everybody,” explains Grazia Concilio, EASYRIGHTS project coordinator and professor of Urban Planning at the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies of the Polytechnic University of Milan in Italy. Finding a job, getting a place to live, registering as a resident citizen: these are often complicated and intertwined procedures that can become an arduous journey.
The EU-funded EASYRIGHTS project co-created a range of new tools to help migrants in interacting with services and procedures, in four cities across Europe – Birmingham in the United Kingdom, Larissa in Greece, Malaga in Spain and Palermo in Italy. These include digital tools to help understand how administrative procedures work and to support linguistic ability in the short and long term. The project also proposed a new standard for public services, which aims to cement a level of established rights for migrants across the EU.
“The challenge, as well as the beauty in EASYRIGHTS, was co-creating the various solutions together and for a diverse set of end users,” says Maryam Karimi, a postdoctoral research fellow also at the Polytechnic University of Milan. These range from unaccompanied minors living in reception centres, to recently arrived asylum seekers in refugee camps, to migrant taxi drivers.
Tackling barriers with smart tools
The first goal of EASYRIGHTS was to address language barriers during administrative processes. The team developed an EASYRIGHTS Agent: a new artificial intelligence powered natural language processing tool operating on Telegram that offers a simplified guide to services.
The tool absorbs information from a range of public documents and application forms and then delivers clear messages about the procedure a migrant should follow: specific deadlines to be met, for example, how to get an appointment, or what certificate is needed in a given situation.
The chatbot also provides vocabulary and pronunciation training exercises to help migrants navigate services more effectively. The chatbot supports 10 languages: Italian, English, Spanish, Greek, French, Arabic, Bengali, Farsi, Urdu and Ukrainian, and also leads users to guidance and support offered by other EASYRIGHTS solutions.
To create these, the EASYRIGHTS project ran a series of hackathons to co-create new solutions for migrants and public sector officials. These gave birth to a range of tools able to tackle locally important issues for migrants, which are now being integrated with the existing municipal services.
“In one of the pilots, you have problems for example due to the linguistic gap for registering new births, because obviously, the templates are in Greek. If you are from an Arabic country this could be completely unknown to you,” adds Concilio.
Establishing a new standard
EASYRIGHTS also developed the ‘Mediation Grammar’ – a service quality standard that works to ensure adequate information rights for migrants, asylum seekers and refugees entering an EU Member State.
The objective of the Mediation Grammar is to guarantee good quality in the mediation between migrants and their rights, an approach based on three ‘pillars’: linguistic accessibility, informational adequacy, and the actualisation of rights.
“What we provide here is a structured description of conditions, which describe the experience of the user in relation to these three pillars,” explains Concilio. “The idea for us is not to ask service providers to use a checklist to assess their services, but rather to guarantee an easy and successful service experience to the users.”
With the support of UNI, the Italian national standards body, the Mediation Grammar is currently undergoing a workshop period through CEN, the European agency for standardisation, a process that will lead to a document presenting the key goals and concepts of the standard and some practical tools.