On New Year’s Eve, Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness declared that recovery from Hurricane Melissa must spark “national transformation.”
On October 28, 2025, Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Jamaica. Cell towers across Jamaica’s southeastern parishes failed. Families lost contact for days. Emergency responders dispatched helicopters without knowing which communities were cut off, which roads remained passable or who needed rescue. The Category 5 storm was Jamaica’s strongest on record, with sustained winds near 185 miles per hour, which caused $8.8 billion in damage, roughly 41% of the country’s GDP, and dozens of deaths. Meteorologists had tracked the storm for days. Authorities issued evacuation orders on October 27. But Jamaica lacked the capacity to send targeted alerts to every phone, coordinate regional evacuations or maintain communications when infrastructure collapsed. The result was preventable chaos.
Holness called the crisis “an opportunity for us to rebuild, but not what was there before.” He spoke of roads, congestion, sidewalks and parking. But he might be overlooking another infrastructure: digital.
In 2025, Jamaica joined the global “50-in-5” campaign to build digital infrastructure for faster services and smarter government. It launched a $3.7 million program to digitally modernize its education system. These are worthy investments. But the global digital public infrastructure (DPI) agenda prioritizes identity and payments; for small island states facing existential climate risk, survival infrastructure must come first: a geotargeted early warning system that reaches every phone when hurricanes emerge.
Lessons from Southeast Asia
As a Jamaican-American researcher specializing in digital communication, media and development, I see lessons Jamaica can draw from Southeast Asia’s Lower Mekong Region, where I led research on digital public infrastructure. When I watched Melissa unfold with no way to reach my relatives, it became clear that Cambodia and Vietnam could offer Jamaica a path forward.
Cambodia and Vietnam share Jamaica’s profile: climate-exposed, middle-income, highly mobile phone-saturated, experimenting with digital IDs and e-government, and reliant on external funders. Both have built digital infrastructures explicitly designed to protect people and property when disasters strike, with governance structures that prevent mission creep into surveillance.
In Vietnam, a Short Message Service (SMS) early warning system links provincial authorities to thousands of village volunteers who receive alerts and transmit real-time flood data back. In Cambodia,the Early Warning System 1294 (EWS1294) enables users to register a basic mobile phone by dialing a short code; when river gauges detect danger, authorities trigger voice and SMS alerts. These systems work when power fails, require neither smartphones nor high-speed data, and embed human rights safeguards.
That last point matters. Early warning systems built without accountability constraints can become surveillance tools. Cambodia’s system limits data collection to phone numbers and geographic zones: no names, no identity verification, and no message content logging. Alerts flow one-way during emergencies; two-way communication only activates when users voluntarily report conditions. Provincial disaster committees, not security ministries, control the trigger authority. These design choices reflect lessons from the region’s history of state overreach, and they offer Jamaica a template for building public trust alongside safety.
Jamaica’s readiness and challenges
Jamaica is well-positioned to replicate these models. Two dominant carriers cover over 95% of the island, andmobile penetration exceeds 100%. Many Jamaicans hold multiple SIM cards. Jamaica operates 15 siren towers that consolidate hazard data for responders. A Japan-funded early warning station in Old Harbour Bay was activated during Melissa. This is proof that the technology works. However, one station cannot cover three million people, and sirens cannot deliver the geotargeted, language-specific instructions that save lives when every minute counts.
Cell-broadcast warning systems alone are inadequate. Catastrophic flooding recently killed at least 276 people in southern Thailand, despite the country having launched T-Alert, a nationwide cell-broadcast system, earlier that year. Alerts reached phones, but the system was new, messages imprecise and once power failed, technology could not compensate. Indonesia, where more than 860 died in the same regional floods, had solid forecasting and a national warning platform but lacked universal, geotargeted cell-broadcast capacity.
Cambodia tells another story. Monsoon flooding days earlier prompted authorities toevacuate over 2,500 families from Pursat province; no deaths were reported. The difference: a decade of building and testing acoordinated early-warning system led officials to act preemptively.
Jamaica’s task is, in one respect, simpler: with a population one-sixth of Cambodia’s size, coordinating nationwide alerts should be more manageable. Jamaica first needs a system that reaches every cell phone with region-specific evacuation instructions. As intergovernmental bodies like theCaribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency and UN-backed initiatives such asEarly Warnings for All invest in better forecasting and coordination, a comprehensive digital disaster system could cost Jamaica a low single-digit number of millions of dollars if it follows Cambodia’s open-source model: RapidPro for messaging, Somleng for telephony, OpenEWS for alert dissemination.
Funding and financial gaps
Jamaica is financing recovery through prearranged disaster funds: a $150 million World Bank catastrophe bond, a $91.9 million Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility payout, plus contributions from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Inter-American Development Bank, the UN and the US Department of State. However, a funding gap remains.
One option to reduce that gap is the Digital Jamaica initiative, funded by the EU with €9.5 million for broadband expansion, school Wi-Fi and digital skills. Because Digital Jamaica operates as budget support — direct transfers to Jamaica’s treasury rather than project-specific grants — the government has flexibility to seek EU approval to redirect these funds toward a national cell-broadcast system delivering geotargeted messages in English and Jamaican Patois. Precedent exists for such reallocations.
If approved, telecommunications regulations should require all operators to support emergency cell broadcast. Network upgrades should dovetail with existing Digital Jamaica projects. The government should train technicians in digital emergency communications and build a network of river-level, rainfall and landslide sensors in vulnerable watersheds, feeding a two-way communication system. Trained volunteers and local officials would confirm receipt of alerts and report conditions: which bridges are gone, where floodwaters are rising and who needs to be evacuated.
Jamaica has an opportunity to use Melissa as a launchpad. Southeast Asian models show what works and what doesn’t. The choices Jamaica makes now will determine whether the next generation weathers future hurricanes or remains trapped by a geography it cannot change.
[Kaitlyn Diana edited this piece.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
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