40 years of DAI

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nia, finished in September 1975. In July of the
next year, Sweet led a team that completed an
innovative design for a project in eastern Zaire
(today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo,
or DRC). Mickelwait and others, meanwhile,
helped USAID design projects in Afghanistan,
Asia, and Latin America. Of these, it was the
Zaire project, in the remote province of North
Shaba, that proved to be a game-changer for
DAI.
Turn to Implementation
In the 1970s, for many development professionals
with high-level academic training, producing
evaluations, sector studies, and project designs
was challenging and fulfilling work. The assignments
drew on their specialized training,
the scopes of work were intellectually rigorous,
and the resulting publications were a way to
earn status and respect in the field. In the era of
“blueprint” planning, the actual work of implementing
projects wasn’t considered terribly
interesting or challenging. But by 1977, one of
the things being debated over DAI’s lunch table
was whether the company should try to get into
implementation. Elliott Morss, who always kept
one foot in academia, insisted the company
should stick with its highly regarded studies.
It might be a “niche” business, Morss conceded,
but it would maintain intellectual rigor
and avoid entanglement in the messy details of
supporting teams at remote overseas locations
with all of the attendant logistical and financial
responsibilities.
But there were powerful arguments in favor
of pursuing implementation contracts. One
was self-evident. Winning them would provide
greater stability and higher revenue that could
enable DAI to at last become a profitable enterprise.
There was also a compelling substantive
reason. In the blueprint days, splitting up design
and implementation might have been reasonable,
but if one accepted the premise of the
process approach, it followed that implementation
was no longer an afterthought—indeed, the
constant monitoring, evaluation, and readjustment
that the process approach called for was
the essence of good implementation. If DAI was
going to be true to its own principles, it would
have to see how its concepts panned out in
practice, and sustain its learning process over
the full project cycle.
There were different models for managing the
new generation of rural development projects.
Whenever possible, it was preferable to work
through existing institutions in the host country.
That way, local norms and culture would be
respected, stakeholders’ commitment would
presumably be higher, and there was much
more likelihood that the project would be selfsustaining.
But that was not always possible.
Local institutions, where they existed at all,
might be failing, weak, or corrupt, requiring the
donor and its implementing partner to field a
project management team, its size and relationship
with local structures determined case by
case, project by project. That field-level engagement
meant a huge expenditure of time, exper-