on-line meeting
Concluded / Concluso
The peer-to-peer meeting between the city of Madrid and the city of Warsaw was organized by the IOM Coordination Office for the Mediterranean in cooperation with the IOM Missions to Spain and Poland, to allow the two municipalities to exchange information on common integration challenges and share good practices on migrants’ reception and social inclusion.
The meeting took place online on 18 November, and saw the participation of, among others, the directors of the primary care and community intervention department and the immigration and refugee department for the city of Madrid, and the director of the international cooperation department and the mayor’s plenipotentiary for women’s affairs for the city of Warsaw.
Each municipality shared key information on the presence of migrants in their respective territories and illustrated the main initiatives in place to provide adequate reception to migrants while facilitating their integration and interaction with the local communities.
Despite the important differences between the two cities with regards to the respective migration dynamics, they exchanged promising practices, in particular in relation to how to ensure migrants’ access to social services remotely, through a multilanguage phone service relying on simultaneous interpretation. Language barriers turned out to be one of the major common challenges, which have become even harder to face in these times of pandemic, as migrants’ needs cannot be addressed in person.
The representatives of both municipalities expressed the intention to enhance mutual information and exchange in order to learn more from each other and better understand how to replicate some of the respective good practices.
The meeting was part of the EU-funded project ADMin4ALL, which aims at enhancing the capacity of municipal administrations across the EU in the area of migrant integration, including through fostering the exchange of good practices among participating cities. Other peer-to-peer exchange meetings will take place online in the coming weeks.