40 years of DAI

2
On a quiet street in northwest Washington,
Don Mickelwait sat on the steps of a
townhouse, waiting and worrying. It was the
summer of 1979 and half a world away a project
team headed for war-torn Southern Sudan was
stuck in Kenya without transportation. Mickelwait’s
company had promised to mobilize the
team quickly, proving its commitment to help the
regional government with its rebuilding program,
but now it looked as if that commitment might
not be fulfilled. For nearly a decade, Mickelwait
and a band of other “pragmatic idealists” had
been traveling the world, acquiring new skills
and knowledge, and making a living in a field
that spoke to their values and challenged their
intellects. They had created a small company,
Development Alternatives, Inc. (DAI), whose
mission was to make a difference in the world
by improving the process of delivering economic
development. DAI had only recently begun to
take off, but sitting on the steps that hot summer
day, its president wondered if it was about
to crash.
A year earlier, a DAI team had helped the U.S.
Agency for International Development (USAID)
design a project to revitalize the agricultural
economy of Southern Sudan after 17 years of
civil war. Christened the Sudan Agricultural Manpower
Development Project (SMDP), the project
would place technical advisors at three different
training institutions and the regional ministry of
agriculture headquarters in Juba. This team not
only needed vehicles suited to the very rough
roads of Southern Sudan, but they would have
to live in prefab housing, hauled overland by
truck from Kenya, to be built by the contractor.
It was a difficult job that DAI had competed for,
successfully, but it required financial resources
and know-how that seriously stretched a young
company.
Mickelwait had good reason to be worried. The
contract with USAID called for DAI to buy eight
Land Rovers—at a cost of $200,000—but that
was much more money than the company had
in its bank account. If they couldn’t pay for the
vehicles to be delivered in Nairobi and driven
to Juba, Mickelwait and his partners might lose
the contract, or perhaps even the company.
Several weeks earlier, DAI had submitted bills
for other contracts to the government, but these
hadn’t yet been paid. The Sudan project team
was sending in daily telexes, each one grumpier
than the last. This morning’s read much like an
ultimatum: someone else will buy the Land Rovers
if we can’t come up with the money. As he
thought about Land Rovers, the problems waiting
to be tackled in Southern Sudan, and the
survival of the company, good fortune arrived
in the form of a postman bearing a check from
USAID paying the earlier invoices. “It saved us,”
Mickelwait later recalled. The team in Nairobi
got the keys to their vehicles, and the difficult
work of implementing SMDP got started.