40 years of DAI

Restoring the Iraqi Marshlands
For centuries, Iraq’s Tigris and Euphrates delta had been
covered with 8,000 square miles of marshes, home to the
Ma’dan, or “Marsh Arabs,” and their rich and distinctive
culture. During the first Gulf War, however, rebels took
sanctuary in this inaccessible region, and Saddam Hussein
took revenge by draining what had once been the secondlargest
wetland in the world. The result: an environmental
and cultural catastrophe.
Almost as soon as Baghdad had fallen, Iraqi and American
authorities began to wonder if the marshes could be
restored. In May 2003, USAID called up DAI’s longtime
expert on water issues, Peter Reiss, and asked him to
develop a proposal. USAID wanted it in a weekend; Reiss
held out for a week. A month later, DAI signed a $4 million
contract for the Iraq Marshlands Restoration Program
(IMRP), funded through USAID’s FORWARD project, and
Reiss led a team that included Iraqis from the University of
Basra and elsewhere into the Mesopotamian marshes for
the first time in 20 years.
By 2005, DAI staffer Ali Farhan could claim with justification
that “the marshes are getting back, they are recovering.”
In 2007, the American Anthropological Association
recognized Reiss’s work on IMRP with its prestigious
Lourdes Arizpe Award, a biennial honor that recognizes
outstanding achievement in the application of anthropology
to environmental issues.
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one who walks in the door. When we urgently needed better
systems, I looked for skill sets and experience that we didn’t
have. But several times I brought in people who thought that
their job was to ‘fix us,’ and therefore never identified with our
mission. And, of course, they didn’t last.”
At the time of succession, Mickelwait and Barclay agreed that
an alter ego for the CEO would be a good idea, something
like the Don/Tony model that had been in place before. A
search process led to the hiring of former ICF executive Ken
Schweers, whose specialty was energy policy and financing,
as Chief Operating Officer (COO), to manage the groups
while the CEO focused on strategy. Schweers proved, said
David Gunning, “that we could in fact manage contracts more
profitably than we’d ever been able to do in the past,” and
his calm temperament was a stabilizing influence during the
period of financial turmoil. But he never developed a strong
passion for development work, and he left the firm in 2002.
The executive team structure remained loose, rather than cohesive,
for the next year, with each operating group tending to
its own business and, in some cases, setting priorities without
reference to the others.
By mid-2003, the costs of fragmentation were starting to
mount, especially on the new business front. The winter and
spring had seen DAI submit a string of losing proposals,
several of which failed even to make the “competitive range”
of finalists. Large investments (each big proposal consumed
at least $50,000, sometimes much more) were being made
in a losing cause, and proposal quality was very uneven. No
one was accountable for new business performance, yet this
was the firm’s lifeblood. Convinced that DAI had lost its sharp
focus on USAID clients, Barclay decided to centralize leadership
of business development and appointed Jim Boomgard
as Senior VP to lead a new unit whose staff would do nothing
but write, critique, and refine proposals. DAI’s win rate began