BELGRADE – European Fund for the Balkans has a new Executive Director – Ms. Aleksandra Tomanić. Among hundred applicants from the Western Balkans region and Europe, she was chosen to lead the Fund in its further developments, continuing its outstanding achievements in terms of investing in the region’s Europeanisation over the course of 10 years so far. She will officially take the lead starting from May 6, 2019.
The public call for a new Executive Director of the European Fund for the Balkans was published in October 2018. After three phases of thorough interviews and professional evaluations, the Fund’s founding partners ERSTE Foundation, Robert Bosch Foundation and King Baudouin Foundation and their respective representatives on the Steering Committee agreed and came to a joint decision about the future leader of the Fund.
Before this position, Ms. Aleksandra Tomanić was working for more than 3 years in development cooperation and at the GIZ.
She was a Senior Advisor assigned to the German-Serbian Initiative for Sustainable Growth and Employment, a globally unique instrument of German development cooperation.
Previously, she worked as a coordinator for regional initiatives and the EU policies at the Social Inclusion and Poverty Reduction Unit of the Government of Serbia. For this position, she moved to Belgrade in 2013. Her formal professional career started 2008 in Brussels at the European Commission, Directorate-General for Neighbourhood and Enlargement (DG NEAR), where she was part of the enlargement strategy and policy unit for almost four years, covering different horizontal policies, but in particular civil society and media issues.
She is a native speaker of German and Serbo-Croatian. Furthermore, she proficiently speaks English and Spanish and is a basic user of French.