How a 19 year-old Syrian refugee is building an app to navigate Germany's red tape
Meet Ghaith Zamrik, a 19 year-old Syrian refugee living in Germany and the the co-developer of an app that's promising to help other refugees and newcomers like him figure out how to navigate bureaucracy.
Zamrik left Syria less than a year ago, in December of 2015. He's one of the estimated 4 million refugees who have fled Syria since its civil war began in 2011.
Zamrik's escape from Syria lasted 5 days, taking him through the Middle East and Europe, before ending up in Berlin.
But getting there was just the beginning. Zamrik soon found himself having to navigate a maze of German bureaucracy — everything from filling out paperwork to finding government offices to enduring long wait times for services. He had a lot of questions about settling into his new life.
"Back then when I was filling the forms, my German was not that good. So I didn't understand much," Zamrik told Day 6.
But the confusion sparked inspiration.
He and five other Syrian refugees met at a free digital coding workshop in Berlin - hosted by the ReDI School of Digital Integration and shared stories about their winding road to calling Germany home.
"One of the problems was bureaucracy and the language," explains Zamrik. "But the language had already so much apps and so much people are already trying to help - so we thought: 'well no-one's doing anything about bureaucracy, why don't we do it?'"
That led them to design an app meant to simplify German bureaucracy. The smartphone app is called "Bureaucrazy" and it's meant to save newcomers to Germany from the same headaches they went through. Zamrik says they can be very discouraging.
"The frustration goes when you have to waste so much time and so much effort to do the little things.... it can be just registering something or getting a paper," he says. "So [those are] the main things that we're trying to help. . .so that they [refugees] could start their new lives with more motivation."
Zamrik and his co-developers launched a crowdfunding campaign this week to help see the app through to a planned launch on January 1st, 2017.
To hear guest host Asha Tomlinson's conversation with Ghaith Zamrik, hit the listen button at the top of the page.