The new consumers

The chal­lenge

Aside from the com­plex­i­ties of the asy­lum pro­ce­dure and cop­ing in a new envi­ron­ment, every­day life as con­sumers espe­cial­ly proves to be dif­fi­cult for refugees: They have to con­clude a mobile phone con­tract in a for­eign lan­guage, for exam­ple, or shop for their daily needs. Com­pe­tent con­sumers can famil­iar­ize them­selves more quick­ly with the applic­a­ble stan­dards in Ger­many and thus gain the nec­es­sary tools for more empow­ered social par­tic­i­pa­tion. Sen­si­bly designed con­sumer pro­tec­tion can thus make a sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to the qual­i­ty of pub­lic life, and dig­i­tal con­sumer infor­ma­tion ser­vices play a deci­sive role in this effort. In order to be able to assess whether these ser­vices fit the needs of their tar­get groups, they have to be thor­ough­ly exam­ined and evaluated.

Our approach

Talk­ing to refugees is far more effec­tive than talk­ing about them. The coop­er­a­tion with the tar­get group must always be para­mount. They are the experts when it comes to defin­ing their infor­ma­tion needs and desired forms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and they should be con­sult­ed and involved. We have worked with them in a num­ber of par­tic­i­pa­tive and inno­v­a­tive ways. 

The result

For two years, we worked with var­i­ous for­mats such as Liv­ing Labs, inter­views and work­shops, involv­ing a group of (refugee) volunteers—the so-called Every­day Ambassadors—from the begin­ning. We also joint­ly mapped, test­ed and eval­u­at­ed all avail­able dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion ser­vices that deal with con­sumer top­ics. We dis­cussed our find­ings with con­sumer advice cen­ters and other stake­hold­ers and pre­sent­ed them at pub­lic events togeth­er with the Every­day Ambas­sadors. In a com­pre­hen­sive and spe­cial­ly pub­lished prac­ti­cal guide, we pro­vide rec­om­men­da­tions on how dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion ser­vices aimed at migrants need to be designed so that they are help­ful and peo­ple actu­al­ly use them. Anoth­er impor­tant result of the project was the friend­ships that we formed with our Every­day Ambassadors.

This project was car­ried out by iRights e.V. Staff mem­bers from iRights.Lab have often devel­oped and car­ried out projects—including this one—for other enti­ties and asso­ci­a­tions in a per­son­al capac­i­ty. In addi­tion, there was a close con­nec­tion and exchange of knowl­edge with the iRights.Lab dur­ing its plan­ning and implementation.