Coming Home

Activities

Coming Home is intended to provide support and assistance oriented towards the specific needs of every individual and every family. The aim is to help people to help themselves. The prospects for the future are analysed together with the returnees with the aim of making it possible to return home voluntarily and maintain one‘s self-respect.

Support for Business start-ups

Those who return to their home country with a realistic business concept and the necessary qualifications and experience can apply for start-up sponsorship from Coming Home. Up to € 3,000 can be granted, to be paid in instalments after departure and on submission of the relevant documentation that the business has actually been set up. In some cases, additional support is also available from local organisations such as SOLWODI, an aid organisation that helps women gain their independence, mainly by granting financial support or a loan.

For example, the programme provided financial aid to establish a repair shop for motors and generators to an Iraqi refugee, who had been working as qualified welder and who returned to his home town Basra, and helped him to transport the tools and machines he had bought in Germany that he had bought and wanted to use upon his return to his, was everything home and granted him financial aid to establish the business.

In another case, financial support was used to purchase a mini-bus for a migrant who returned to Kosovo to set up a greengrocer business.

Support for Returnees‘ relief projects: The Office for Repatriation Assistance supports aid projects in migrants‘ home countries who live, or have lived, in Munich. Since the Office was established this form of development aid has been an integral part of its self-concept and its sphere of activities. In the early years it was mainly areas in Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo that were supported. Returnees were mainly involved in an advisory capacity so that donations and relief operations were utilized and implemented where they were most needed.

For a period of five years, Office for Repatriation Assistance supported the establishment of private schools by a migrant who returned to her native Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, in an area where previously no schools. In 2008, 15 years after the starting of this project, 700 children attend the school, with special provisions for sponsorships for orphans.

A success story a migrants who returned to Afghanistan in 2003. During the twenty years that he lived in Germany he trained to become an orthopaedic technician, working in this profession for a number of years before he returned to Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban regime to see exactly what conditions were like and whether it was possible to return and set up a business there. With the financial support of AGEF and Coming Home he opened an orthopaedic workshop in Kabul. The returnee has since expanded his business and in 2008, had 5 employees. He supplies orthopaedic aids for injured war veterans and fits artificial limbs, as well as manufacturing crutches, walking frames, wheelchairs and bicycles for people with disabilities. In an ongoing partnership, the Social Services Department of the City of Munich and the NGO Empor collect donations for the workshops and once a year, they send an aid convoy to Afghanistan.