Psychosocial counseling online: Ipso Care

We offer confidential psychosocial online counseling worldwide on our dedicated video platform www.ipso-care.com. Currently, there are more than 40 counselors from over 15 countries available for counseling in more than 20 languages. This extends the outreach of our services to clients who do not have access to our face-to-face counseling. The platform was originally developed to extend the outreach of our psychosocial services in Afghanistan, where mobile broadband coverage is surprisingly good. In a next step it was extended to serve refugees in Germany. Over time, our online services attracted clients from more than 70 countries, in the years 2019 and 2020 thousands of online counseling sessions were held. In some locations, Ipso runs so called care points for clients who do not have smartphones or the knowledge to register on www.ipso-care.com and make appointments. Outside Afghanistan and Germany, such care points are run in cooperation with local partner organizations, for example for Syrians in refugee camps in Jordan. In this case, INTERSOS provides and manages local access to our service, and clients speak with fellow Syrians based at our Ipso Care Centers in Germany. The Covid-19 lockdown in Germany caused us to shift face-to-face counseling sessions from our Care Centers in Berlin, Erfurt and Hamburg to our online platform. Since then we have helped out cooperation partners whose services were also affected by the lockdown. We aim to extend our services by providing them in further languages and by offering care points in more locations to be able to reach out to vulnerable populations across the globe.