History

The founders: from left, Charlie Sweet, long-time CEO Don Mickelwait, and John Buck.

Today, employee-owned DAI is an integrated professional services and advisory firm that provides project design and delivery, management consulting, and financial services to companies, investors, and governments worldwide.

A Consistent Purpose

Since our founding, DAI’s role has been to help our clients address their most pressing challenges.

DAI made its earliest mark through a series of analytical studies. In 1973, we won a contract to analyze 36 U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) projects in Latin America and Africa.

The resulting study, Strategies for Small Farmer Development, cemented the firm’s growing reputation, and we built on this momentum to seek more substantial assignments managing projects in partner countries. Our first major project was to revitalize the agricultural economy in the North Shaba region of Zaire. Other initiatives in rural and agricultural development followed in Sudan and elsewhere.

Tony Barclay, a Ph.D. anthropologist who did his field work in Kenya, joined the firm in 1977 to help implement the North Shaba program. He became company President in 1990 and served as CEO from 1999 to 2008. In his last year as CEO, Barclay was named Executive of the Year at the annual Government Contractor Awards.

Among a new generation of DAI employees joining the firm in the 1980s was Barclay’s successor Jim Boomgard, a Ph.D. economist who played a key role in developing an approach to small business promotion in emerging frontier markets and managed a landmark multicountry study called Growth and Equity through Micro-enterprise Investments and Institutions (GEMINI).

Global Transformations

At the start of the 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union led to enterprise development, privatization, and governance projects for DAI in Eastern Europe. DAI also added a banking and financial services unit around this time. In 1995, we invested in London, U.K.-based Graham Bannock & Partners Ltd., which would go on to give DAI what is now a thriving presence as a partner for British and European clients.

Following the 9/11 attacks of 2001 and the subsequent U.S. military actions, DAI was called on to lead a variety of challenging development projects in Afghanistan, a country where we worked as early as 1977. Similarly, after the fall of the Iraqi regime in 2003, DAI won a project to help provide legitimate governance in the country. Other assignments in Iraq covered agriculture and, famously, the restoration of the Iraqi Marshlands.

The middle years of the decade also saw the company innovating in the health arena. The firm won USAID’s flagship avian influenza (AI) control program, STOP AI, then RESPOND—a broader program that built the capacity of institutions in developing nations to respond to pandemic threats—Strategies Against Flu Emergence (SAFE), the global Preparedness & Response project, and the U.K.-funded Tackling Deadly Diseases in Africa Programme.

With the emergence of COVID-19, DAI brought this expertise to bear as part of the pandemic response.

Growth and Diversification

At the start of 2009, Jim Boomgard became DAI’s new CEO, a position he held until 2025. The next year DAI celebrated its 40th birthday by publishing a 40 year retrospective.

The First 40: A History of DAI

In 2013, DAI joined forces with the distinguished British consultancy HTSPE Ltd., in a combination that yielded enhanced capabilities and offered greater value for money to global—and especially European—clients. DAI quickly became a top supplier in the United Kingdom and subsequently launched an office in Brussels to bring us closer to European clients. We expanded our European footprint in 2019 with the integration of Vienna, Austria-based Human Dynamics, a pre-eminent supplier of technical services to the European Commission.

In recent years we have expanded our services to commercial clients through the acquisition of Local Content Solutions and the expansion of our management consulting practice. In 2020, DAI launched DAI Magister, a specialist investment bank that assists emerging and frontier market companies to scale faster by facilitating strategic M&A and growth financing.

And we are steadily expanding our presence in the health arena through strategic investments in three digital health startups—ThinkMD, MobileODT, and ClickMedix. We welcomed Health Partners International to the DAI team in June 2017.

In 2025, Tine Knott assumed the role of DAI President and Chief Executive Officer.