Matchmaker In Chief

By Helena Bachmann/Geneva

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," he notes. In all, TFTP has brokered deals worth an estimated $7.5 million and given new hope to businesses in countries from Thailand to Pakistan.

A 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 the International Secretariat for Volunteer Service, an intergovernmental agency based in Geneva; married a Swiss, Ruth Griwa, and stayed.

On a trip to Africa in the 1970s, he witnessed the indifference of government officials mandated to improve rural grain storage. "There was no financial reward for them, and I realized company-to-company transactions would be more effective because of a mutual profit incentive," he says.

It was 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 in the former Soviet republics. The Indian company will provide production technology and marketing savvy, and the Georgian firm will provide raw materials and factory and office facilities. "Neither side committed capital to the deal, and none was needed in order to launch the project," Dichter says.

TFTP acts as a mediator, a time-consuming process of getting two strangers to meet, like each other and form a happy union. "We travel a lot, know the needs of that region, which nation needs what technology and which country can provide it," Dichter says. After a business-to-business match is made, TFTP prepares contracts and monitors the transfer of production technology. "These are countries where the notion of business as we know it is not the way of life," Dichter says. "But they want to save money and make a profit like any Western company."

How does TFTP thrive in the process? The company is paid on a contract-to-contract basis by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. So far, Dichter has brokered 75 deals involving the transfer of production technologies. "It's a laborious process that sometimes involves a lot of hand holding, almost like being a marriage counselor," Dichter says.

Those who know him agree. "David sees to it that there are no communication gaps," says longtime business associate Sunil Gambers, director of Sunil Gambers Laboratories in Bombay, a company Dichter matched up with Vita Laboratories in the Republic of Georgia for an herbal-medicine venture. "He will go out of his way to see to it that a project he has undertaken gets positive results."

Dichter says his goal now is to apply his formula to sub-Saharan nations, where poverty levels are the world's worst. "I believe technology transfers from Asia could be Africa's wave of the future and a boon to its economic growth," he says. "But the challenge is getting venture capital to a region shunned by foreign investors." Sounds like a good match for his talents.