On October 28, 2025, the same day Hurricane Melissa tore through western and southern Jamaica, the government launched supportjamaica.gov.jm to collect emergency donations. Nine months later, the agency responsible for that platform is still trying to explain — twice now, in two separate public statements a week apart — why it never finished the one job it promised to do: bring donors' personal and financial data under government control.
This is not a story about whether Jamaicans gave generously. They did — more than 16,900 donors, over J$1.4 billion collected by the government's own July count. It's a story about what happens when a government builds critical infrastructure on borrowed technology, delays the paperwork, misses its own deadline, and then spends nine months managing the fallout instead of the platform.
What the Committee Forced Into the Open
The unravelling started in Parliament, not in a newsroom. At a sitting of the Public Accounts Committee, ODPEM Director General Commander Alvin Gayle admitted, under direct questioning from PAC Chairman Julian Robinson, that Support Jamaica remained owned by the private developer that built it — and that the developer retained access to donor information, including names and contribution amounts. This was not a leak. It was extracted, on the record, because someone in Parliament finally asked the right question.
ODPEM's Board Chairman, Trudy Deans, moved to soften the picture immediately afterward: the site sits on the government's .gov.jm domain, which no private company can hold, and the developer — Amber Group, the same firm this paper has separately reported holds an official government technology envoy title — never controlled the donated funds directly. That distinction is real. It is also not the same as the data being secure, government-controlled, or migrated on schedule, as promised.
A Timeline That Doesn't Add Up
According to ODPEM's own account, the underlying technology wasn't built for Melissa at all. Amber originally developed it after Hurricane Beryl in 2024, under a royalty-free licence, then repurposed and scaled it for Melissa. The Deed of Agreement formally governing that arrangement wasn't signed until December 27, 2025 — a full two months after the site had already been collecting Jamaicans' money and personal data. That agreement was supposed to include migrating donor data off Amber's hosting environment onto a government system.
That migration still hasn't happened. ODPEM has now said so twice, in near-identical language: on July 29, the agency stated plainly that it "did not complete the migration as agreed and accepts responsibility for the delay." It's a rare admission — but one that raises the obvious follow-up nobody in government has answered: responsibility accepted for what, exactly, and by when will it actually be fixed?
In its most recent statement, ODPEM shifted the framing again, describing Amber's role as a philanthropic contribution rather than a paid contract, and arguing that using a private technology provider "does not alter the government status of the platform." That may be legally defensible. It does nothing to address the security lapse the Auditor General already flagged, and it arrives conveniently late — nine months after the fact, and only after sustained public pressure forced the agency's hand twice in one week.
The Auditors Saw This Coming
None of this should surprise anyone who read the Auditor General's real-time review, covering the period up to January 2026. That audit found ODPEM had failed to properly separate who could request, approve, and grant access to the platform's administrative dashboard — a basic control failure — and ruled the arrangement non-compliant with the Data Protection Act. Critically, the audit noted that design, coding, and source-code rights for the entire platform remained with the developer, not the state, from day one. A follow-up Auditor General review in May 2026 went further, giving ODPEM a failing grade on financial management of the donated funds themselves, finding no formal agreement governing how long money could be retained or when it had to be released.
| Metric (as audited/reported) | Figure |
|---|---|
| Donors registered (as of Jan 11, 2026) | 16,900 |
| Volunteers registered | 4,628 |
| Funds raised (as of Jan 11, 2026) | US$1.4 million + J$71.4 million |
| Total donations reported (July 2026) | More than J$1.4 billion |
| Deed of Agreement executed | December 27, 2025 — after launch |
| Data migration completed | Not completed as of July 29, 2026 |
A Government That Explains Instead of Fixes
Civil society groups had already sensed the rot. At a Cross Roads protest this summer, organiser Kay Osborne told the crowd that more than 98 per cent of hurricane relief funds remained unspent eight months after Melissa made landfall — a claim the government has never directly disputed. Set that beside ODPEM's own admission that it never finished securing the data of the very people who gave that money, and a single picture forms: an agency more comfortable issuing statements about accountability than practicing it.
Nine months, two carefully worded press releases, and one still-unfinished data migration later, more than 16,900 Jamaicans still don't have a straight answer about who has held their personal information since the day the storm hit — and how much longer that will remain true.