40 years of DAI

immense—and DAI’s projects are making a
tangible difference in meeting them. In the east
of the country, for example, the Alternative
Development Program (ADP), led by Jonathan
Greenham, improved the lives of literally millions
of people between 2005 and 2009. It reached
2,600 communities, bringing 24,000 hectares of
land into licit agricultural production; generating
17,000 full-time jobs; training 118,000 farmers,
government officials, and small business
owners; and providing more than a quarter of
a million subsistence farmers with inputs and
technical assistance that raised their incomes
anywhere from 60 to 125 percent. ADP’s cashfor-work
programs alone generated 6 million
person-days of local employment, breathing life
into local economies and leaving behind more
than 200 infrastructure improvements. ADP’s
successor, IDEA-NEW, also led by Greenham,
is now extending ADP’s approach into northern
and western Afghanistan. A Philadelphia
Inquirer journalist who traveled to Afghanistan
to visit the program called IDEA-NEW a “model
of success.”
The challenge is to continue this kind of satisfying
work, to continue the DAI tradition of
working at the leading edge of development
practice, while managing risk. At the time of
this writing, it appears that such risk can be
managed, and DAI’s employee owners are fully
committed to sustaining their efforts in Afghanistan.
But the calculation of risk is a constant
and conscientious one. In making its decisions,
Boomgard said, the company will be guided
by its touchstones: the core mission to make a
difference in the world, and the core values he
reiterated when he took over in 2009—people,
accountability, quality, integrity, profitability, and
independence.
In many ways the decision will revisit one of
the abiding tensions in the DAI story: whether
and how much to pursue growth. Historically,
the company has always opted to grow rather
than stand pat, to move from project design
to project implementation, for instance, or to
launch new practice areas and new offices,
or to take on ever larger and more complex
initiatives for its clients. And the rationale has
been constant: more projects and more diverse
technical disciplines mean more opportunities
for adding to DAI’s store of knowledge; and
more revenues mean more resources to invest
in the firm, which means a greater capacity to
deliver development results. Such growth never
The Alternative
Development
Program/Eastern
Region is one of
USAID’s great
success stories in
Afghanistan.
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