40 years of DAI

8
Over the next two years, hard work and connections
yielded enough business for DAI to stay
afloat. In 1972, a Ph.D. macroeconomist named
Elliott Morss joined DAI. An important addition
to the leadership team, Morss had taught at top
universities and had worked in development
since the mid-1960s. He could be prickly and
sometimes impatient with clients, but he was
a brilliant analyst and writer. Morss helped the
company obtain some “social indicators” survey
assignments, and Mickelwait landed some strategy
work in Thailand that was funded by the
Department of Defense. DAI also did studies on
insurgency and stability for the Defense Department’s
Advanced Research Projects Agency,
and reviewed a RAND study on the Philippines.
These small contracts kept the company alive,
but made Mickelwait even more determined to
build an economic development portfolio at the
first opportunity. The chance to do this came in
1973.
The Process Approach
The events that opened the door for the
fledgling DAI grew out of a dilemma that had
confounded development analysts and theorists
for a long time. Through the 1960s, most foreign
aid programs focused on macro-level growth
and infrastructure investment, with the goal of
increasing economic output at the national level.
Yet even when per capita wealth increased, in
many developing countries the gap between
rich and poor tended to widen, and conditions
in rural areas stagnated. In 1973, the World
Bank announced a new focus on rural development,
and, in parallel, Congress passed a key
amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act that
called for “New Directions” in development aid
and reoriented USAID programming toward
rural development and poverty reduction.
That summer, USAID’s Technical Assistance
Bureau contracted DAI “to identify ways of
improving design and execution of development
assistance programs and projects whose
success depends on individual or group action
by low-income sections of rural populations.”
As a baseline for such improvements, USAID
required a comparative study of 36 existing
projects in Latin America and Africa, all of which
were considered highly successful. DAI competed
for and won the contract to conduct that
study.
This “small farmer study” was a much bigger
undertaking than anything DAI had previously
done, but the firm was beginning to expand.
John Buck, the only one of the founders who
was married, had taken a more secure job at the
Treasury Department. But in addition to Elliott
Morss, DAI’s Director of Research, the firm had
recruited more intellectual horsepower in the
shape of Craig Olson and John Hatch.
Olson held a Ph.D. in international studies
from Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced
International Studies. Although DAI seemed to
him “very much still a start-up thing,” he was
impressed with Mickelwait and Sweet’s commitment
to the ideals of development. He joined
Sweet in the field, visiting 22 small farmer proj-