Due to its continued work in Slovakia, VOST Portugal receive a letter of recommendation from the Ministry of the Interior of the Slovakian government.
On behalf of the Migration Office of the Ministry of Interior and as Chair of the inter governmental Steering Committee on Migration and Integration of Slovakia, I hereby confirm the timely intervention and irreplaceable role of VOST Portugal in providing my Office with an online data platform collecting and displaying all key data concerning the unprecedented flow of people fleeing the war in Ukraine via Slovakia.
My agency, as well as the crisis management structures of the Ministry of Interior, with little to no experience in managing the largest migration wave since WWII, was overwhelmed by the numbers. The institutional structure as well as the IT architecture and operational mechanisms were too slow to react to the need of building a website as an open datasource for the agencies of the state and organizations involved in management of the crisis.
VOST Portugal stepped in to help and in March 2022, in just a couple of weeks, came up with an operational platform CONFIRM SK4U that collects daily figures of the refugee flows in and out of the country, their regional distribution, employment rates, school participation by children, and is open to many more applications of cross-check and analysis.
The platform fulfills all GDPR criteria regarding data sharing and can be either publicly shared or have its sections open only to those who need particular information in their agency. The most appreciative part of the VOST Portugal’s contribution was not only the speed the tool was delivered, but also the fact that by providing it as an open source, and for free, we could avoid a time consuming public procurement process required for such service.
We will use the tool further for distribution and management of questionnaires necessary for improving the quality of humanitarian services, and integration services, available to more than 60,000 refugees currently residing in Slovakia. I cannot stress enough the importance of the timely and professional intervention by VOST Portugal / VOST Europe, and its open source platform CONFIRM, in helping my agency and the Slovakian Government in these trying times.
Jan Orlovski, Bratislava, October 25th 2022
