Ana Brnabić

Ana Brnabić
Prime Minister of Serbia Designate
Assuming office June 2017
President	Aleksandar Vučić
Succeeding	Ivica Dačić (Acting)
Minister of Public Administration and Local Self-Government of Serbia
Incumbent
Assumed office 11 August 2016
Prime Minister	Aleksandar Vučić Ivica Dačić (Acting)
Preceded by	Kori Udovički
Personal details
Born	(1975-09-28) 28 September 1975 Belgrade, Yugoslavia
Political party	Independent
Alma mater	Northwood University (BBA) University of Hull (MBA)

Ana Brnabić (Serbian Cyrillic: Ана Брнабић; born 28 September 1975 in Belgrade, Serbia, then Yugoslavia) is a Serbian politician who has been the Minister of Public Administration and Local Self-Government of Serbia since 11 August 2016, under Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić and Acting Prime Minister Ivica Dačić. She is the first openly gay government minister in the history of Serbia.

Biography

Brnabić is of Croatian descent. Her father is from island Krk. She holds an MBA diploma of the University of Hull from Great Britain and has been working over ten years with international organizations, foreign investors, local self-government units, and the public sector in Serbia.

In August 2016, she was appointed as the minister of the government administration and local self-government in the Government of Serbia. In addition, she is the President of the Council for Innovative Entrepreneurship and Information Technologies of the Government of Serbia, as well as of the Republic Council for National Minorities and the Vice President of the Republic Council for Public Administration Reform.

As a member of the Government of Serbia, she was primarily dedicated to a faster systemic introduction of e-governance in Serbia aimed at a more efficient operation of the government administration and local self-government, direct enhancement of the quality of life of the citizens of Serbia, building of a more modern and more transparent administration and fight against corruption. The two most important project she implemented in this segment during her term of office are the project e-Baby („Baby, welcome into the world“) and e-LGAP (full implementation of the Law on General Administrative Procedure). The project e-Baby ensures that parents at one place, specifically in a maternity hospital, free of charge and without any additional documents, register their newborns and receive the Birth Certificate and the health insurance card at the address of their permanent residence. This system has been functioning, as of 1 January 2017, in all the maternity hospitals in Serbia. The project e-LGAP for the first time in Serbia interconnected the databases of six important institutions and it enables the local self-government units and citizens of Serbia automatic exchange of data from official records and eliminated the need for excerpts, certificates, attestations and any additional documentation that already exists in official records. The system is being gradually introduced in the local self-government units in Serbia and the entire country will start using it by the end of 2017. For the citizens of Serbia this will mean annual savings of around RSD 245 million in stamp duties, elimination of the need for printing out and exchange of 6.7 million documents and the overall savings of over 6 million hours of waiting in queues in front of counters.

As the President of the Council for Innovative Entrepreneurship and Information Technologies of the Government of Serbia, with the other members of the Government, in everyday consultations with the IT industry of Serbia, start-up and innovative companies, she developed the Action Plan and launched its fast implementation. Some of the results include introduction of IT as a mandatory subject in primary schools, raising of the quota for enrolment of students in technical faculties across Serbia, strong support to the further development of the Scientific and Technological Park (the STP) in Belgrade, commencement of construction of the STP in Novi Sad and construction of the Students Start-up Centre in Niš as the first phase of the STP development in Niš. The programme was also initiated for re-training and the first candidates interested to be employed as junior programmers in the IT sector are completing their training in July 2017. A broad dialogue has also been initiated between the Government, economy and the civil society organizations on the strategic trends of digitalization of Serbia.

Within the framework of the fight against gray economy which the Government of Serbia has initiated, as the Minister of the Government Administration, Ana Brnabić was in charge of the implementation of the prize competition „Take the bill and win“ in which over 40% citizens of Serbia participated and which resulted in significantly raised awareness of the citizens of Serbia about the importance of the combat against gray economy. Today, as many as 94% of the citizens of Serbia are giving full support to the Government in the combat against gray economy, and small subjects to fiscalization in which gray economy was most present, from January to March 2017, increased the registration of turnover via cash registers by incredible 33.84%.

Ana Brnabić is also a member of then group ‘New Leaders for Europe’ within the World Economic Forum. Sebastian Kurz, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Austria, the prime ministers of Estonia, Island and Malta, as well as numerous other prominent persons also belong to this group. From the President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, on 15 June, she was appointed the prime minster designate.

Prior to the appointment in the Government of Serbia, she had been the Director of the company Continental Wind Serbia – CWS where she had worked in the implementation of the investment of EUR 300 million in the wind park in the municipality of Kovin.

She participated in the foundation and was the first executive director, as well as a member of the Managing Board of the non-profit foundation Peksim, which grants scholarships to talented students from Serbia and Macedonia to complete their master studies on Cambridge, under the condition to return to their fatherland after the studies and to help its economic and social development.

An important phase in her CV is the engagement in different US consulting companies that implemented projects in Serbia that were financed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). She was deputy manager of the Serbia’s Competitiveness Project, the expert on the Local self-government Reform Program in Serbia and the senior coordinator of the Program of Economic Development of Municipalities.

She actively participated in the foundation of the National Alliance for Local Economic Development (NALED) in 2006. She made great efforts to build capacities of NALED for representation of interests of the business sector, local self-government units and the civil society in Serbia. During that engagement, she participated in the introduction of the concept of local economic development in Serbia and building of potentials of municipalities to improve the business environment at the local level with active promotion of investments. She became a member, and thereafter the President of the Managing Board of NALED, which got the status of the biggest autonomous private-public organization that endeavour to improve the business environment in Serbia and which has contributed, in close cooperation with the Government of the Republic of Serbia, to the building of competitiveness of Serbia on international scale and on the Doing Business list of the World Bank.

She has been awarded numerous plaudits for the development projects on which she worked, for the promotion of socially-accountable business operation and tolerance.

See also

• Prime Minister of Serbia
• Second cabinet of Aleksandar Vučić
• List of elected and appointed female heads of state and government
• List of the first LGBT holders of political offices