40 years of DAI

DAI worked in the
Caribbean and
elsewhere to help
economies diversify
from rural agriculture
into the production of
exportable goods.
36
vention in Grenada in 1983. Originally, HIAMP
was an unusually experimental and innovative
project that aimed to bring U.S. agribusiness
expertise and deal-making techniques to the
very small island economies of Barbados, Grenada,
and their West Indian neighbors.
Mickelwait had participated in the design of
HIAMP, along with Don Humpal, who recalls
“it was very complex, and Don [Mickelwait]
probably understood it better than many of our
clients and local counterparts.” This distinction
cut both ways: it helped DAI prepare a winning
proposal, but it also meant that HIAMP was perceived
as a risky venture by many of its stakeholders.
The project goal was to empower local
entrepreneurs to move the economy beyond
tourism, bananas, and sugar cane to high-value
export products. Although DAI’s team identified
many promising opportunities—encompassing
28 subprojects across seven island states—
most of the prospective local investors proved
risk-averse, and personnel and policy changes
in USAID’s regional agriculture office resulted
in restrictive directives that frustrated the field
team, as well as Humpal and Mickelwait. Four
years after it started, the leaders of the original
DAI team were gone, and HIAMP lost its
entrepreneurial edge, with most of its activities
scaled back to a more traditional technical assistance
model.
In other countries, however, DAI demonstrated
greater persuasiveness and staying power
when it brought new ideas to the client’s table.
In Indonesia, Bill Fuller—after many years in
Asia with the Ford Foundation—had arrived in
1982 as a noncareer USAID mission director.
He encouraged innovation by his own staff and
the organizations that supported the country
program. Among the new initiatives was the
Central Java Enterprise Development Project
(CJEDP), whose design would involve in-depth
analysis of leading subsectors in the provincial
economy. This challenging task appealed to
Mickelwait, who threw his energies into writing a
successful proposal for the two-year project design
contract. Gary Kilmer was named CJEDP’s
Chief of Party, and he found himself interacting
closely with Fuller’s highly engaged team at
USAID, which demanded a rigorous analytical
approach to this novel project. Kilmer recalls,
“They needed convincing that their ideas would
really work in practice.” Among those initially on
USAID’s side of this exercise was Jim Boomgard,
a young academic who had been trained