40 years of DAI

A smiling Jean Gilson
(center) at a DAI
company picnic.
46
It seemed like a classic 1980s
success story. A young banker in one of the
nation’s top financial institutions had just helped
engineer a large leveraged buyout. It was the fall
of 1986, and the young banker in question was
Jean Gilson. After the celebrations were over,
Gilson returned to her hotel room and switched
on the television to learn that the transaction
would put hundreds, perhaps thousands, of
people out of work. She knew she had to make
a change in her life. “Exciting as that time was,
I really felt like I wanted to make a difference,”
she later recalled. Gilson entered graduate
school in international relations at Tufts University’s
Fletcher School and was soon at DAI,
where she was one of the fresh faces who
helped the company break new ground in the
1990s.
DAI’s core competencies—dating from the
Strategies study—were grounded in rural development
and smallholder agriculture. Although
its technical scope had broadened considerably
in its second decade, the company had remained
focused on its traditional client, USAID,
and the geographic regions its leaders knew
best and cared most about: Asia in Mickelwait’s
case and Africa in Barclay’s. But as the new
decade began, the development landscape was
changed dramatically by the end of the Cold
War and the collapse of communist political and
economic systems across Central Europe and
Eurasia. These changes and mounting political
challenges to its mission in the United States
substantially affected USAID itself and began
to reshape the market in which DAI operated.
No one had foreseen the full extent of these
transitions, but DAI proved nimble, eager to
learn, and willing to adapt. That made all the
difference.
Small, Medium-Sized,
and Micro Enterprise
Development
Like Gilson, Jim Boomgard brought experience
to DAI that positioned the firm to adapt
successfully to new demands for new kinds
of technical expertise. Fresh from writing up
the lessons learned during his tenure as Chief
of Party in Central Java, Boomgard began to
immerse himself in “microenterprise,” a relatively
new term that would eventually become a