Word: dichterized
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...David Dichter likes being a matchmaker. And like any self-respecting love broker, he takes pride in arranging happily-ever-after marriages. Dichter's mission is to bring together entrepreneurs in developing countries and help them form profitable alliances. "They need someone to be the proverbial honest broker," he says...
That's the idea behind Dichter's company, Technology for the People, founded in 1977. Based in Geneva, Switzerland, TFTP confronts a common challenge of the developing world: while small and medium-size firms need help from the industrialized world, rich-country production technology is expensive to buy and maintain. Dichter's solution was to notice that many enterprises in southern and Southeast Asia have the technical and managerial expertise to help start-up businesses in other developing countries. "Their operating costs are much lower than those of a Western company, so they demand less return on their investment...
...native of Atlantic City, N.J., Dichter, 69, says he has always been interested in development issues. He studied Asian economics at Aligarh Muslim University in India, where the idea for TFTP took root. "I was affected by the poverty, the lack of technology and the contrast between rich and poor," he says. He went on to earn a master's degree at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., and a Ph.D. at Birbeck College in London. In the 1960s he worked in Washington as a U.S. Foreign Service officer for Asian countries. He went to Switzerland in 1970 to coordinate...
...this principle of "trade, not aid" that was TFTP's cornerstone. Dichter says capital is scarce in developing countries, and high-interest loans are inaccessible to small enterprises. "We had to come up with a different game plan in order to arrange deals that the banks wouldn't touch. Using equipment or technical know-how as equity is usually satisfactory to both partners." Earlier this year, Dichter brokered a fifty-fifty joint venture, worth about $250,000, between Akshay Urja in Poona, India, and a company called Ekrani in Tbilisi, Georgia, to manufacture solar hot-water-heating systems for sale...
...faculty of the Core Curriculum should reevaluate the Core's success at "introduc[ing] students to the major approaches to knowledge," but the proposed proliferation of double-counting and course substituting does not solve the problem. Sasha Dichter...