DUNDEX is an international consulting company providing short-term capacity support worldwide to UN offices that (a) need to respond urgently to emergencies (natural disasters or man-made conflicts), (b) face staff shortages caused by vacancies or unexpected staff movements, or (c) need ‘head-hunting’ support for consultancy tasks for which former UN staff are especially suitable.

Their main asset is their searchable ROSTER with more than 1,100 seasoned and deployable former UN staff. In aggregate, they have over 16,500 years of UN work experience in all parts of the world, and they represent 83 different nationalities. The DUNDEX roster functions as a pre-positioned reserve of UN-relevant expertise – off payroll in normal times, but quickly mobilized when needed.

DUNDEX was established in mid-2009 by a group of former UN staff living in or connected with Canada. Over the years, while working as UN staff or as UN consultants, we had observed that

• UN managers are often left to fend for themselves, when they urgently require short-term assistance (available HQ support tends to give priority to recruitment for career positions).
• No UN agency is systematically tracking and staying in touch with former staff or project personnel. When they separate from the UN, they are all too easily forgotten -- out of sight, out of mind.
• Former UN staff working as consultants tend to operate in a ‘lone wolf’ manner. Cut off from their usual networks, they rely mainly on personal connections and learn mostly by individual trial-and-error.

They concluded that a smarter approach was needed - to make it easier (a) for the UN to capitalize once again, when required, on the expertise, experience, and institutional memory of its former staff, and (b) for former UN staff to remain traceable, deployable, connected - and supportive of each other.