Sladjana Marinkovic: Building Futures

Breaking Barriers in Business

In the center of Belgrade, where apartment blocks crowd narrow streets and sunlight bounces off parked cars, Marinkovic has built something few people expected—a cleaning company that became her family’s lifeline, and her own quiet act of defiance.

“I never belonged anywhere,” says Marinkovic, who grew up in Roma public housing in Vracar, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of Belgrade, surrounded by neighbors who were not Roma. Her mother worked as a cleaner. Her father maintained boilers for large facilities. “In Belgrade, I was poorer than my classmates. In my mother’s village, I was the city girl.”

She describes a lonely childhood spent focused on her studies. Her high grades were treated with suspicion. How could a Roma, who belonged in the streets, earn top marks?  

She pursued vocational studies in economics, met her husband, had a daughter, but struggled to secure a job. “I wanted to work within my profession as an economist, but the market was flooded. Her mother’s cleaning agency needed help, and she accepted. “I liked working as a cleaner,” she says. “Others thought it was strange that I was an economist, but for me it wasn’t embarrassing.” 

For five years she scrubbed the floors of wealthy clients’ homes until she decided to think bigger and successfully applied for a grant to start her own cleaning business with training from the Roma Entrepreneurship Development Initiative. “They taught me how to build something.”

Today, a decade later, Marinkovic runs a company that cleans office buildings, apartment blocks, and private homes across the city. She employs a dozen women—Roma and non-Roma, from 18 to 60—and still joins her husband for “jump-ins,” taking on jobs herself when needed. 

Discrimination still surfaces. Once, when a client asked her not to bring Roma cleaners, Marinkovic hung up the phone. “I told them, ‘I’m Roma,’” she says. “Later, they apologized, but I wanted them to understand. I told them, ‘I never asked your ethnicity.’”

Now, with her daughter studying psychology and her own apartment, Marinkovic measures success differently than before. “What makes me happiest is that I have the opportunity to help others—not only with my knowledge but by providing good working conditions and salaries.”  

Her dream is to mentor other Roma women—to teach them how to navigate the same barriers she did, and to help them chase their dreams.