In partnership with the Pompeu Fabra University, which is leading the project, the Secretary of Immigration of the Generalitat of Catalonia, and the technology company Everis in Catalonia, and with 10 other organizations and companies from Galicia, Germany, the United Kingdom, Greece and the Czech Republic, the iSocial Foundation we have started an European Horizon2020 project aimed at developing a multilingual personal assistant who will help immigrants and refugees through the smartphone, at the time of arrival in Catalonia and during their adaptation process towards inclusion in our country. The project, which is called Welcome, has been selected by the Horizon program of the European Commission, will last for three years and it has a budget of four million euros.

The personal assistant that will develop Welcome will be experimented and implemented in the 5 participating countries and will be a voice system that will have language versions in the languages of the Mediterranean area and the Middle East where the main migratory flows now affects these five countries, in addition to Catalan and other European languages. The smartphone assistant should serve the immigrants and refugees to improve the knowledge of Catalan society and the processes of labor insertion, based on information appropriate to the profile of each person, and is expected to also respond to the most frequent demands of immigrants and refugees on many other issues. At the same time, the anonymised data that is collected will be used so that the administrations can develop policies more in accordance with the profiles of the people who finish arriving. Within the project, the main task of the iSocial Foundation will be to make the taste and experimentation of prototypes and the final technological instrument with immigrants and refugees from different origins.

Welcome is an example of the type of innovation projects that we promote from the iSocial Foundation, for its objectives, for its international dimension, and because it is the result of the collaboration of diverse agents, beyond the social sector: universities, technology companies, public administrations, etc.

Currently, and in parallel to Welcome, from the iSocial Foundation we are promoting other innovation projects for the social action sector of Catalonia, in collaboration with universities, administrations, social entities and diverse companies, in fields such as the improvement of local Social Services, the attention to adolescents and young people migrating alone, elderly people in a situation of unwanted loneliness, homeless people, young people with mental disorders, or people with intellectual disabilities.

You will soon have more information about the Welcome project in the project web portal and we will inform you about the developments and the progress of the project.