Benny Dembitzer has been involved in the field of economic and social development in the South for forty years. He worked at the Economist Intelligence Unit in London before directing the work of the Fund for Research and Investment for the Development of Africa (FRIDA) in twenty African countries.  At the Commonwealth Secretariat he was adviser on industrial development in the nine Southern Africa Development Coordination Conference (SADCC) Countries.

He has worked in 35 countries in Africa and 2 in Asia including 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 drafted the UNDP five-year economic development plans for both Gambia and Liberia. He was economic adviser to the Dutch aid programme in Indonesia and consultant for the Department for International Development (DfID) on Fairtrade and with UNAIDS in London and Addis Ababa.

He has worked for NGOs, including OXFAM in Ethiopia; CARE International in Lesotho; International Voluntary Service in Botswana, Cameroun, Lesotho and Swaziland; War on Want in Cameroun. In the 1970s he undertook undercover missions for Amnesty International in Gabon, Cameroun and Chad. 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 undertook
consultancies for Transparency International on corruption in the arms trade. 

From 1987 to 2006 he ran the annual GLOBAL PARTNERSHIP, an event involving hundreds of British NGOs working in development.  During 2007 and 2008 he was economic adviser to Africa Invest, a fund investing in agriculture in Malawi.  He teaches economics at various Universities and currently runs courses on international development.

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