Belong Nordic: The app to track your citizenship application in the Nordics

If you’ve ever left your home and moved abroad, you will know that there can be some confusing times. There’s usually a lot of paperwork involved too – visas, residency permits and even gaining a new nationality. While some parts of these processes are straightforward, others can be a minefield to figure out. 

Do you know the feeling of waiting months without any updates or answers? The way you can only live in the present, not knowing if your new citizenship will be granted soon or not? Trying to keep up with all the documentation, getting your head around administrative changes, tests and forms to complete?

Thankfully, for those in the Nordics, there’s an app to help ensure your residency and citizenship application processes run smoothly and to guide you along the way – Belong Nordic. 

The app was created by fellow foreigner Jordi Fakiani, a Spaniard who moved to Denmark and then decided to make it his home, raise a family and to get his Danish citizenship. 

“I was born and raised in Barcelona, Spain,” Fakiani explains. “I had a good life there. But I always had the quiet feeling that mine was going to be built somewhere else. Part of it was curiosity. I wanted to know who I would turn into in a place where nothing was familiar.” 

“I moved to Denmark for love, but the Nordics also gave me opportunities I don’t think I would have found anywhere else. I built a career in banking. I built a family here,” he adds. 

“Moving abroad is romantic for about three weeks. After that it’s paperwork and learning to begin again as an adult.”

See where you stand on your path to citizenship with Belong Nordic.

Fakiani believes that getting your initial residence permit for the Nordics is relatively straightforward, including personal numbers (CPRs), digital IDs and bank accounts. 

“Compared with a lot of Europe it’s fast, digital and polite. The hard part is not arriving, it’s everything after,” he explains. 

“Permanent residence and citizenship are a long game, and the rules are different in each country.”

The number of years of residence in each place, the way you support yourself, the language exams, citizenship tests and the number of days you spend outside the country all differ. Each country has its own conditions and they get updated frequently. 

Most of the information is written in the local language too, which is a lot to ask of someone who is just learning Danish for example. 

“You can do everything right and still have no idea how close you are. That was my experience for years. It’s also the most common thing I hear from other people in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland,” Fakiani says. 

That’s where the Belong Nordic app comes in. “It started as something I made for myself. I was tracking my own road to a Danish passport. I only wanted one answer. How is my progress going? Nothing gave me that, so I built it,” he explains. “My twin brother also moved to Malmö in Sweden and is walking the same citizenship pathway under a different set of rules, so I wanted to help him too,” Fakiani adds.

Belong Nordic helps users track citizenship requirements, upcoming deadlines and time spent abroad. Image: Belong Nordic

“I kept meeting myself. Every time the subject came up, at work, at a party, at the playground, someone told me the same story with different details, always unsure of whether they were almost there or nowhere near.”

Fakiani confesses that uncertainty is more difficult than people admit. It affects everything from buying an apartment and accepting a job to making plans for next year. 

“The rules were never really the problem. They are published and anyone can read them. The problem is that nobody puts them together and tells you plainly where you stand. I could give people an honest answer. That felt worth doing.”

Belong Nordic is built for everyone on residency or citizenship pathways. It takes the official rules of your country and turns them into one clear picture. You simply tell it your situation, when you became resident, the type of permit you have, your time abroad, how your language skills are, and it works out where you stand. 

“If you can see where you stand, even when the answer is not yet, you can plan, you can breathe and you can stop reading government websites at midnight. Knowing where you stand is its own kind of relief,” explains Fakiani. 

The app has a dashboard, which splits your journey in two – the part you control and the part you can’t. It shows you which routes are open to you, depending on your situation such as standard naturalisation or being married to a citizen. 

Find out where you stand on your path to Nordic citizenship with Belong Nordic.

It gives you reminders of all the dates you need to keep track of, when rules take effect, when you need to sit exams etc. 

It also allows you to store all your documents in one place. Crucially though, the documents are not uploaded to the internet and there’s no log-in. This means they’re stored on only on your own device, making it more secure. 

Most importantly, it allows you to trace your application number via the various authorities – the Ministry of Immigration and Integration in Denmark, Migrationsverket in Sweden, UDI in Norway and Migri in Finland. 

Fakiani reminds users that “Belong Nordic is not legal advice, and the final word always belongs to the relevant authority in each country. “We would rather be the map that gets you to the right door than pretend to be the door,” he says. 

Belong Nordic covers Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland and is available on iPhone and the web, with one subscription for both at belongnordic.app.