Minister De Moor’s cabinet (CD&V) is joining forces with Belgian IT company In The Pocket to more smoothly coordinate the capacity of closed reception centers for asylum seekers.

The reception crisis has been a structural problem in our country for months. Reception centers suffer from capacity constraints, which undermines the overarching asylum policy. The responsible federal minister, Nicole De Moor, wants to solve this with a new digital platform that will provide better insight into the current capacity of the closed centers. This is part of the emigration policy process.

The new digital platform gives the immigration authorities’ employees easier access to all available data from the closed centers. This should contribute to more efficient coordination of the capacities of each center as well as overarching policies, Minister De Moor said in a press release.

“We will automate manual and time-consuming administration as much as possible. With the new system we also know exactly how many free places are available in each center at all times. “In this way, we can make optimal use of every location to organize forced returns,” said the minister.

In the bag

The platform was set up by Belgian digital product studio In The Pocket. The company was founded in 2010 and now employs more than 200 people, spread across offices in Ghent, Leuven, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Bucharest and Lisbon. Belgian customers include Payconiq and itsme, although the collaboration with the immigration authority represents the company’s first step towards the public sector.

“Over the last fourteen years we have gained a lot of experience developing large digital products and platforms for leading companies. We look forward to putting this expertise to work for the government. For us, developing a digital platform is more than a technical challenge,” says Chief Product Officer Hannes Van de Velde. When developing the platform, the protection of personal and sensitive information was an important point, adds Van de Velde.