ABA therapy for children in Serbia and Montenegro: where to find help when there are almost no specialists

For families who've moved to Serbia or Montenegro, one of the first practical questions is simple: where do you turn if a child needs behavioral therapy, but there are almost no certified applied behavior analysis specialists in the country. ABA therapy for children in Serbia and Montenegro is first and foremost a question of a shortage of specialists, not a question of price or bureaucracy like in some other countries — and that changes what strategy actually works here.

Why there really are so few specialists

According to the official registry of certified behavior analysts (BACB), the entire world outside the US and Canada accounts for only about 3.7% of all certificates — and that's distributed extremely unevenly across 67 countries. Even among the countries with the most notable presence of such specialists — the UK (364), Italy (185), Ireland (156) — the count runs into the hundreds, not thousands. Countries of the Balkan region, including Serbia and Montenegro, aren't even on that list of countries with a notable presence, and it's worth saying plainly rather than softening it: finding a certified BCBA specialist locally in these countries is a task that's unlikely to be solved through a simple internet search, no matter which city you're in.

An additional factor: since 2023, the Behavior Analyst Certification Board (BACB) has stopped accepting new applications from specialists residing outside the US and Canada — meaning even the prospect of more local specialists appearing in coming years through international certification is objectively limited for this region by that rule.

What this means in practice

Since the local market of specialists is extremely limited, in this situation the remote format isn't a just-in-case backup option — it's essentially the main realistic path to getting structured behavioral help without moving to another country or taking multi-month trips to a specialist in a neighboring region.

What you can do right now

• Start with a remote skills assessment for your child — VB-MAPP/ABLLS-R doesn't require the specialist's physical presence and doesn't depend on whether there's a local BCBA in your city.
• In parallel, ask local parent communities and associations of families of children with developmental differences what local resources do exist — speech therapists, psychologists, special educators working with related methods — they don't replace a specialized behavioral program, but they can complement it locally, especially for parts that require physical presence.
• Don't put off starting sessions while waiting for a local specialist to appear — given the constraints described above, it's reasonable to assume the remote format will remain the main way to get this specific kind of help for the foreseeable future, rather than a temporary measure for a few months.

A point worth being honest about

We don't have reliable, detailed data specifically on the local early intervention system in Serbia and Montenegro — unlike, say, Germany or Poland, where the public system is documented in more detail. If you have up-to-date information about local support programs, local specialists, or government measures in your city, let us know — it will help us add more accurate details to this article for the next families in a similar situation.

At Sense Behavior, working with families in Serbia and Montenegro is built as a full remote program — skills testing, an individual plan, and ongoing specialist supervision, without the need for physical presence near the family.