The REBUILD project aims at improving migrants and refugees’ inclusion through the provision of a toolbox of ICT-based solutions aimed to enhance both the effectiveness of the services provided by local public administration and organizations, and the life quality of the migrants. The project follows a user-centered and participated design approach, aiming at addressing properly real target users’ needs, ethical and cross-cultural dimensions, and at monitoring and validating the socio-economic impact of the proposed solution. Both target groups (immigrants/refugees and local public services providers) are part of a continuous design process; users and stakeholders’ engagement is a key success factor addressed both in the Consortium composition and in its capacity to engage relevant stakeholders external to the project.
The overall implementation strategy of REBUILD covers three multidisciplinary and interdependent areas:
- The design and specification of the system and related operation conditions derived from a complete analysis of the context information and the definition of different users’ scenarios.
- The development of the different REBUILD toolbox modules based on the previous in-depth data gathering process.
- The validation of a complete version of REBUILD platform through different pilots that will lead to the system consolidation.
REBUILD recognies the importance of users and stakeholders’ engagement as key success factor. REBUILD’s design approach is user-centred and interactive: both target groups (refugees/migrants and local public services providers) are part of the requirement analysis.
In this direction and to achieve the project objective, REBUILD designed a methodology for data collection and interviews with the two target groups – refugees/immigrants and public services providers/NGOs – with the aim of collecting and categorising their profile and needs.
At a second stage, 3 co-creation 2-day workshops were organized in Italy, Spain, and Greece where, the scenarios and requirements that the REBUILD toolbox would provide, were thoroughly discussed with both target groups on separate seminars.
The results achieved by the above data collection process are used to design the REBUILD platform and toolbox that aim to match the needs of the refugees/immigrants and the skills identified with the services provided by the public sector and their respective needs.