40 years of DAI

Donald R. Mickelwait
(above right) worked
for the Air Force
and USAID before
meeting Charlie
Sweet at Harvard’s
Kennedy School of
Government.
After working at the
U.S. State Department
in Vietnam, Charlie
Sweet (right) was
thinking about a
self-sustaining
business model for
doing economic
development work.
4
which was enacted in 1961 and replaced two
predecessor agencies with USAID. Perhaps just
as important, Kennedy inspired a generation of
idealists with the creation of the Peace Corps,
also in the first year of his presidency. Committed
to working within the cultures and institutions
of developing countries, Peace Corps
volunteers—mostly young college graduates
filled with enthusiasm and curiosity, but with
little real-world work experience—went through
intensive language training before starting
two-year tours as teachers, health workers, and
community development advisors in dozens of
poor countries, usually at remote rural sites.
Collecting People
Don Mickelwait and the founders of DAI had
come to development around the same time
as the Peace Corps, and ultimately they would
work alongside many Peace Corps volunteers.
However, their perceptions of the possibility
of change in the developing world had been
shaped more by work associated with the
military in Southeast Asia. Their conviction
that development work could be done on an
entrepreneurial basis reflected an idealism of a
different stripe from their Peace Corps counterparts,
and one that was less widely accepted—
for as the 1960s wound down, few Americans
believed that economic development could be
much more than a philanthropic exercise.