AdvertisementWhere Is the Money Going?
By HSJ Staff · · 5 min read
Ten months after Melissa, a plain accounting for everyone abroad who gave.
Yu remember what yu did that week? Hurricane Melissa made landfall in late October 2025. Many of us felt helpless, and some of us felt something closer to hopeless. So we did what we could. We rushed to help the island we love.
Maybe you sent money through a relief fund. Maybe you filled a barrel and paid the shipping without looking too hard at the receipt. Maybe you sat in a church hall in the Bronx or Brixton or Broward and put an envelope in a basket, then went home and rang your aunt in Sav to make sure she had water.
And then, some months later, you saw a photograph. A house in the country with blue tarpaulin still stretched over the rafters, held down with old tyres. And a thought came that you probably did not say out loud, because saying it felt disloyal.
Where did the money go? It is a fair question, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a rumour. Here is what the public record shows.
SIZE MATTERS.
Start here, because nothing else makes sense without it. The Planning Institute of Jamaica, working with the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, assessed the total damage, losses and associated costs of Hurricane Melissa at J$1.952 trillion. That is US$12.2 billion, and it is equivalent to 56.7 per cent of Jamaica's entire economic output for 2024.
More than four times Gilbert. The costliest event in the country's recorded history, by a distance. The Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management recorded 156,000 homes damaged. Of those, 24,000 were total losses.
Against that, the Inter-American Development Bank has noted that Jamaica's total available resources for response came to roughly US$1.08 billion, and that figure already includes a US$415 million disbursement from the International Monetary Fund in January 2026.
Roughly one dollar available for every twelve dollars of damage. That is what a small country being hit by something enormous looks like. And it is the single most important fact for understanding why the help, wherever it came from, felt thin when it arrived.
THREE DIFFERENT POTS, OFTEN CONFUSED.
Here is where most of the confusion sits, and untangling it changes the picture. There were three separate streams of money after Melissa. The money the public donated to Government. The money Government spent on repair grants. And the money that never passed through Government at all. They came from different places, they were spent on different things, and each has its own problems.
The first pot: what we donated. Donations collected by the Government through its relief portal and held by ODPEM amounted to J$1.44 billion by late February 2026. That is the pot most of us think we contributed to.
The second pot: what Government spent. The repair grants come from here, not from the donations. The Restoration of Owner or Occupant Family Shelters programme, known as ROOFS, was funded with a J$10 billion allocation from the national budget. By June 2026, the Ministry of Finance reported that J$67 billion had been spent on recovery across ministries and agencies through supplementary estimates for the 2025/26 financial year.
So when someone says the diaspora gave millions and families received J$75,000, they are placing two unrelated numbers beside each other. The grants were never funded from the donations.
The third pot: what never touched Government. NCB reported mobilising J$450 million with its partners for Melissa recovery, and separately offered customers payment breaks, refinancing and extended repayment terms through April. Food For The Poor, Global Empowerment Mission, UNICEF and others moved aid directly through their own networks. None of that appears in the ODPEM donation figure or in the ROOFS allocation.
If you gave through a church, a charity or a bank drive, your money is in this third pot, and it is the least visible of the three. All three matter. But they answer different questions, and they have different problems.
WHAT THE GRANTS ARE, AND WHAT THEY BUY.
ROOFS pays in three tiers, based on a formal damage assessment. J$75,000 for minor damage, meaning a structurally sound house with damage to roof, windows, doors or fixtures. J$200,000 for major damage, where structural elements were compromised. Up to J$500,000 for severe damage, where a home requires demolition and complete reconstruction. At roughly J$160 to the United States dollar, that is about US$470, US$1,250 and US$3,100.
Nobody rebuilds a house for US$3,100. The programme was never designed to. It was designed to put something in a family's hand quickly, at a scale the country could afford across tens of thousands of households at once. Understanding that is not the same as being satisfied with it.
The disbursement has been real and it has been substantial. By mid March 2026, more than J$5.2 billion had been paid out under ROOFS and 100,000 properties had been assessed. Separately, the National Housing Trust had processed about 5,100 applications worth J$2.2 billion by late June 2026, out of roughly 8,300 received, with most coming from Westmoreland, St James and St Elizabeth.
SO WHY IS THAT HOUSE STILL UNDER TARPAULIN?
Three documented reasons, none of them dramatic, all of them consequential.
The first is verification. By late April 2026, more than 114,000 households had been assessed, but only 42,617 had been fully verified and issued their vouchers or payment notifications. Assessment is not payment. Between those two numbers sit tens of thousands of families waiting, and most of them have no way of knowing where in the queue they are.
The second is reach. Residents in St James told the Gleaner they had watched assessment teams pass through their districts and were never contacted afterward. The Ministry acknowledged that access difficulties, communication gaps and data inconsistencies had caused delays in rural communities. Anyone who has driven a country road in the months after a storm will understand exactly how that happens.
The third is the most quietly frustrating. In Westmoreland it was reported that recipients were travelling to Savanna la Mar to redeem their grants and spending close to J$100,000 in transport to do it, leaving J$400,000 of a J$500,000 grant in actual materials. The grant erodes before it reaches the roof.
THE ACCOUNTABILITY QUESTION, STATED PRECISELY.
In May 2026, the Auditor General tabled a real time audit in Parliament. It is a public document, and it is worth reading rather than hearing about.
It found that of the J$1.44 billion in donations received by 23 February 2026, J$26.2 million, or 1.8 per cent, had been spent by that date. It found J$34 million in roofing materials that could not be verified because delivery slips and goods received notes were missing, and a further J$141.1 million in committed expenditure without confirmed payment documentation. It found that ODPEM had no formal agreement governing the retention of donated funds, and that unspent balances from Hurricane Beryl in 2024 had not been disclosed to the Finance Ministry.
Auditor General Pamela Monroe Ellis wrote that weaknesses in financial management, governance and programme accountability had limited transparency over the relief resources.
Two things should be said about this, both of them true. The audit documented failures of record keeping, control and governance. It did not find theft. That distinction is not a technicality and it should not be blurred by anyone, in Jamaica or abroad.
And the Government's response is also part of the record. It noted that a real time audit is a snapshot of a process still underway, and that while the donated funds sat largely uncommitted, some J$11.3 billion was being spent across more than 400 relief and recovery contracts.
There is a third thing worth noticing, and it is the most encouraging fact in this entire article. An independent office audited a live relief programme, published what it found, and tabled it in Parliament while the work was still going on. That is a system examining itself in public. Not every country does that.
WHAT TO ASK THE NEXT TIME.
Because there will be a next time, and this part is actually in your hands. The lesson of the past ten months is not that giving does not work. It is that giving without asking questions leaves you with no way to know. So ask three before you send anything.
Where exactly is it going, and to whom? Look for organisations that name places. BREDS, the Treasure Beach Foundation, states plainly that it works across the eight districts of the Greater Treasure Beach area on the south coast of St Elizabeth, and that it has been working there for close to thirty years through sport, healthcare and education programmes, long before any storm arrived. A claim that specific can be checked. "The Caribbean" cannot.
How does it actually reach a family? The serious organisations will tell you, and they will count. After Melissa, Food For The Poor moved 229 ocean containers into Jamaica and completed 21 air shipments, delivering more than US$10 million in food, hygiene supplies, medical support and building materials through local partners on the ground. It reports 234 roofs restored, 22 fishing boats repaired, and every beekeeper in its programme back in production. That last figure is the tell. An organisation that counts beekeepers is an organisation that is actually counting.
What did last time produce? This is the one most people skip. Before you give, look for the report on the previous emergency. After Hurricane Beryl, the NCB Foundation's Building a Better Jamaica Fund published what its J$459 million produced: 1,821 homes, facilities and roofs restored, 1,191 small farmers supported, and humanitarian aid reaching more than 12,685 people. It reported a utilisation rate of 94.2 per cent and an average spend of J$31,787.60 per beneficiary, measured against international humanitarian benchmarks. It also named every partner organisation that delivered the work, among them Food For The Poor, Mustard Seed Communities, UNICEF and the American Friends of Jamaica. Those figures are the Foundation's own, not an independent audit. But whether or not you would give to that fund, that is the shape of an accounting you can actually read.
Two more habits worth forming. Give to the second year, not only the first week. Emergency appeals close after a month. The tarpaulins are still there after ten.
And give to organisations already working in Jamaica before the storm. Groups with existing relationships in a parish move faster than groups arriving cold, because they already know whose roof is gone.
WHAT WE OWE EACH OTHER.
There is a version of this article that would be easier to write, and angrier, and it would travel further. But we are not looking for someone to blame. We are looking for impacted Jamaican family homes to have roofs as the next storm season approaches.
What the record shows is a country hit by something more than half the size of its own economy, responding with about a twelfth of what it needed, imperfectly, publicly, and while being watched. What it also shows is a diaspora that gave before being asked.
From yard to abroad, the connection held. Now it needs to hold longer than the news cycle did.
