The Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management received approximately $1.44 billion in donations for Hurricane Melissa recovery through the Support Jamaica website and direct contributions, according to the auditor generals May 2026 report. As at February 23, 2026, roughly four months after the storm, only $26.2 million of that had actually been spent, about 1.8 percent of the total raised.
The finding surfaced publicly when Opposition Leader Mark Golding cited it at the Peoples National Party conference in Savanna-la-Mar, using the gap to argue that western Jamaica had been left waiting on both government machinery and donated funds that were sitting largely untouched. Families cannot rebuild securely without the peace of mind of owning the land where their home is built, he said, pairing the spending criticism with a call for a dedicated land-titling programme for disaster-affected communities.
A large unspent balance this long after a disaster is not automatically evidence of mismanagement, disbursement mechanisms, verification of need, and procurement processes all take real time, and moving too fast with donated funds carries its own accountability risk. But the scale of the gap, over 98 percent of $1.44 billion still sitting unspent months into a recovery that displaced tens of thousands of people, is large enough that the explanation matters, and the auditor generals office flagging it publicly puts pressure on ODPEM to provide one.
Golding has called for a public reconstruction dashboard tracking spending in real time, a demand that would make this exact kind of gap visible as it happens rather than surfacing months later in an audit report. Whether or not that specific proposal goes anywhere, the underlying accountability question, where does a donation actually go, and how quickly, is one that will keep resurfacing after every future disaster until Jamaica has a standard answer for it.
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