40 years of DAI

People with guns, in
canoes or otherwise,
were somewhat
common in DAI work
areas, but by 2001,
armed soldiers were
protecting some of
DAI’s own offices.
80
just across the border from Kuwait, and find a
meeting place for the city’s town council. Bigger
tasks soon followed in dealing with the looting
that followed the fall of Baghdad. To help get
the national ministries back on their feet, DAI
implemented a $4.1 million “ministry-in-a-box”
program that provided standard office equipment
to every agency of the Iraqi government.
OTI’s effectiveness in those early weeks was
noticed by the Coalition Provisional Authority,
and soon the CPA and USAID quadrupled
the budget. By its close in mid-2006, the Iraq
Transition Initiative had disbursed some 5,000
grants valued at more than $350 million across
every province in the country. In contrast to the
vast amounts wasted or stolen from many bigticket
reconstruction contracts, ITI was efficient,
lean, and gave value for money.
From the beginning, security was a serious concern
in Iraq. DAI’s ITI team was first stationed
in Baghdad’s Green Zone, in one of Saddam
Hussein’s palaces, communicating by satellite
phone and using sleeping cots as desks. But
staying in the safety of the Green Zone would
compromise the team’s efficiency and ability
to work with Iraqis. Within two weeks, employing
the networks of an Iraqi firm DAI had been
using in the northern, Kurdish city of Erbil, the
DAI team moved into a safe area in the Mansoor
District and began hiring Iraqi staff. Working
through Iraqi firms based in Erbil but with nationwide
and interethnic networks, ITI hired Iraqi
guards, most of whom were peshmerga fighters
from the north, to provide low-profile but robust
security. The presence of live-in Kurdish security
caused neighbors to assume ITI was a Kurdish
construction firm with expatriate engineers, an
accidental cover that suited the team well.
By late 2004, Baghdad had become too danger-
ous for such low-profile measures to protect
DAI’s expatriates. But raising that profile, by
bringing in expatriate security providers and
putting in blast structures, would make offices
targets and endanger Iraqi staff moving in and
out of the compound every day. Instead, DAI
opted to manage Iraqi staff in Baghdad and
other high-risk areas remotely, from the relative
safety of Erbil, with expatriates visiting Baghdad
only when required and using communications
technologies to stay in close touch with local
teams. This arrangement permitted DAI to tap
local knowledge and maintain capacity in Baghdad
and elsewhere without jeopardizing Iraqi
and expatriate staff. Figuring out how to operate
in high-risk environments was becoming a core
competency of the firm.