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- Benny Dembitzer is a British economist who has specialized in the economics of developing countries, particularly on the continent of Africa. He was a member of the team that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. Benny runs a company called ETHICAL EVENTS LTD that provides an umbrella for a range of activities in the wider field of education for development. The company runs three projects. The first is a series of courses on the economic and social development challenges of the Global South. These GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT COURSES have been run in London since 2003. Over 750 staff of different voluntary organisations through the UK that work in the field of development (from OXFAM to Save the Children Fund, from ActionAid to WaterAid) have been trained via this highly professional short course, organised twice a year in central London. Most of the staff of the voluntary agencies are familiar with perhaps one area of work. These courses try to introduce them to the full range; from global finance and micro-finance, to health and education. Most of the challenges of the South are seriously different to those of the North and people with special skills and knowledge try to widen the participants understanding. The Department for International Development (DFID) and the Houses of Parliament has similarly sent some of their staffs on these courses. The second project is GRASSROOTSAFRICA, a not for profit organisation that offers an on-line agricultural advisory service for farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. The aim is to set up a service that, in the long run, will be accessible on mobile telephony as well as on the internet and in a variety of languages. The project is being trialled across Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda in 2015 and 2016, but was suspended in 2018 because of the lack of cooperation of voluntary agencies in the targeted countries. It is now researching and bringing together small projects in agriculture that are aiding and supporting perhaps a few villages or a small area in Malawi to understand how batter they can be helped to expand. www.grassrootsafrica.org. The third area of work is publishing books on development. The latest is THE FAMINE NEXT DOOR. AFRICA IS BURNING. THE NORTH IS WATCHING - published in September 2018 and available on Amazon. The book tries to explain how the migration crisis that has hit Europe is not the result of the attractions of Europe to would be migrants, but the need to escape what are already intolerable situation of climate change, overpopulation, degraded lands ad shortages of water. Benny Dembitzer studied economics at Cambridge University under Amartya Sen, and subsequently followed him briefly in teaching at Trinity College in the mid 1960s. He was on the staff of the Economist Intelligence Unit in London for three and a half years. He directed the work of the Fund for Research and Investment for the Development of Africa (FRIDA) in twenty African countries in the 1970s. At the Commonwealth Secretariat he was for two years adviser on industrial development in the (then) nine Southern Africa Development Coordination Conference (SADCC) Countries. Over the years he has worked in 35 countries in Africa and 2 in Asia. They include Pakistan for the Aga Khan; Ethiopia for the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO); Lesotho for the International Trade Centre (ITC); Djibouti for the World Bank; Guinea and Indonesia for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). He also drafted the UNDP five-year economic development plans for both The Gambia and Liberia. For seven years he was economic adviser to the Dutch aid programme in Indonesia. He worked as a consultant for the Department for International Development (DfID) on Fairtrade. In 2003 he worked with UNAIDS in London and Addis Ababa. He has worked for various voluntary agencies, including OXFAM in Ethiopia; CARE International in Lesotho; International Voluntary Service (IVS; now Skillshare Africa) in Botswana, Cameroun, Lesotho and Swaziland; War on Want in Cameroun. In the early 1970s he undertook undercover missions for Amnesty International in Gabon, Cameroun and Chad. He set up the first shop in London dealing with what is now called Fairtrade in 1973*. He was European Director of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) when it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. He has undertaken a consultancy for Transparency International, UK, on corruption in the arms trade. In 1985 he became marginally involved with the relief operations kick-started by Bob Geldof in Ethiopia. From 1987 to 2006 he ran the annual Global Partnership, an event bringing together some hundreds of British voluntary agencies working in development. During 2007 and 2008 he was economic adviser to Africa Invest, a fund investing in agriculture in Malawi. Over the last 10 years he has taught economics at various times at Cranfield, London SouthBank, London Metropolitan and Greenwich Universities. He is a visiting scholar of the University of Greenwich, Honorary fellow of University College London (UCL) and the UNISOL University of Florianopolis in Santa Catarina, Brazil.. Since 2014, Benny has been invited to open different international conferences and give keynote speeches at various institutes. In November 2014, he spoke at the international development meeting of PriceWaterhouseCooper in Washington D.C. He spoke again in December at Encuentros de Chile, the International Association of Chilean scholars, at their annual meeting in Santiago de Chile. In September 2015, he spoke at the international conference on sustainable development at the University of UNISUL in Florianopolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil. In February 2016, he gave the Principal's Lecture at the Cheltenham Ladies' College, and subsequently returned to the University of UNISUL to give the key note address at the 20th anniversary of the International Relations Graduate Programme in November 2016. In May 2019 Dembitzer went to give a talk at Woldingham School. He wrote The Attack on World Poverty: Going Back to Basics in 2009. He wrote "Sleepwalking Into Global Famine - the world cannot feed 9.1 billion people" in 2012, which was reprinted in 2013. THE FAMINE NEXT DOOR. AFRICA IS BURNING. THE NORTH IS WATCHING was published in 2018 and translated into Spanish in June 2019. (en)
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