2023 Tier 1 Afghanistan Award Winner

In August 2021, when the Taliban took control of Kabul, DAI had six ongoing U.S. Government projects in Afghanistan, fielding approximately 550 staff. Twenty-two expatriate staff were able to board military transport to be evacuated, but too many of DAI’s Afghan colleagues remained behind.

One month before the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, DAI’s Vice President of USG Programs had declared that supporting Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) applicants would be “our highest priority as a business unit, as we have a moral obligation to our colleagues.” Two challenging years later, DAI remains true to this commitment, and measures its results in concrete terms: since August 2021, DAI has helped 297 former staff and their families—1,208 people in all—to relocate from Afghanistan, and it currently has an additional 170 staff—representing 723 people—notified by Department of State’s Coordinator of Afghan Relocation Efforts (CARE) to prepare for relocation in the coming months.

In the month leading up to the U.S. withdrawal, the volume of SIV requests incoming to DAI quintupled. In response, its HR department rapidly launched an Emergency Response Team of 50 home office volunteers. These initial “pioneers” invented many of our processes and effectively laid the groundwork needed for the success of what would become the formal SIV Team.

By January 2022, five months post-withdrawal, DAI had converted the Emergency Response Team into a permanent SIV Team, which deployed 10 full-time employees dedicated solely to processing employment verification letters (EVL) and letters of recommendation (LOR). By February, the backlog was cleared. The company was able to move that mountain because DAI’s SIV Team is driven by a sincere dedication to their Afghan colleagues. Eventually, they determined that the best way to help people escape Afghanistan was to focus intently on ensuring the accuracy and authenticity of SIV documentation so that DAI could earn the reputation as a thoroughly reliable and fastidious partner for USG and other counterparts when manifesting opportunities arose.

The results have been gratifying. Between August 2021 and early 2023, DAI’s SIV Team distributed 1,407 EVLs, delivered 644 LORs, and referred 292 individuals and their eligible family members to the P-2 Program.

When former DAI staff members arrive at the CARE processing center in Camp As Sayliyah in Doha, Qatar, they receive a DAI-authored, 46-page comprehensive guide to resettling in the United States—in English, Dari, and Pashto—which has now been adopted by #AfghanEvac (an invaluable partner) and shared on its website, accompanied by a list of well researched, often-overlooked areas for resettlement, profiling their in-depth characteristics and benefits.

DAI remains engaged in the development of Afghanistan, where the firm continues to implement three USAID-funded programs. And its support for Afghan colleagues, past and present, remains unwavering.

About DAI: DAI is an employee-owned international development company, one of the world’s larger enterprises dedicated solely to international development. Global in reach—fielding more than 5,000 staff—DAI is delivering development results on more than 200 projects in more than 80 countries, from stable societies and high-growth economies to challenging environments marked by political or military conflict, including Afghanistan, Haiti, and Ukraine. The company’s tagline (“shaping a more livable world”) speaks to a mission that is unchanged since 1970: helping people improve their lives.