Only 1.8% of Melissa Donations Spent: A Governance Reckoning That Cannot Be Avoided

Kingston, Jamaica, 13 May 2026

A real-time audit by the Auditor General’s Department has found that of the $1.44 billion in cash donations received by the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management following Hurricane Melissa, only $26.2 million, representing 1.8 per cent, had been spent by 23 February 2026, four months after the storm made landfall. The finding has ignited a parliamentary debate about whether the failure to deploy the funds constitutes a governance failure, a bureaucratic bottleneck or both, with government and opposition senators reaching markedly different conclusions.

The auditor general’s report also revealed that $138.8 million in unspent Hurricane Beryl donations from 2024 remained in ODPEM’s accounts at the time of the Melissa audit, having never been disclosed to the Ministry of Finance as required by law. The accumulation of undisbursed disaster relief funds across two separate hurricanes points to a systemic problem in how Jamaica manages the interface between public goodwill, emergency fundraising and government expenditure frameworks. When Jamaicans and diaspora donors contributed to the Support Jamaica fund in October 2025, they expected that money to move. The audit has confirmed that, for most of it, it did not.

Government: Bureaucracy Is the Problem, NaRRA Is the Answer

Government senators have argued that the unspent donations do not represent a failure of intent or governance, but a consequence of the procedural requirements of Jamaica’s public finance framework, which requires ministerial authorisation for the expenditure of designated funds. The $1.4 billion in donations, they argue, has been exponentially outweighed by the $11.3 billion the government has spent on 420 relief and recovery contracts currently under way, and that the auditor general’s findings are a snapshot in time rather than a verdict on the overall programme. NaRRA, they contend, is precisely the mechanism that will overcome the bureaucratic constraints that slowed donation deployment.

The opposition’s response is that bureaucracy is not a credible explanation for money that was never directed anywhere. Eighty-eight per cent of the donations were not merely unspent, they argue, but uncommitted, meaning no expenditure decision had been taken about how they would be used. That is not a processing delay. It is, in the opposition’s characterisation, a planning failure, and one that predates any conversation about NaRRA entirely. They have called for a transparent expenditure plan and a comprehensive disaster protocol covering customs clearance, port handling, cold chain logistics and freight coordination, to be published before the 2026 hurricane season.

What This Means for Property Recovery

For families in Black River, Parottee and across the western parishes still living under damaged or temporary roofs, the audit’s findings are not an abstract governance story. They are an account of what did not reach them. Donors who contributed with the expectation that their money would repair homes, provide materials and support families in crisis have a reasonable right to know why, four months later, 98.2 per cent of those funds sat untouched. The prime minister’s argument that the donated funds have been earmarked for lasting, visible, traceable uses is a legitimate policy position. It needs to be accompanied by evidence, in the form of a clear expenditure plan and a timeline, that the money will reach the people it was given for, before it is overtaken by the next hurricane season.