300 YSEP WORKERS TO ASSIST WITH POST MELISSA DATA GATHERING
The Ministry will be enlisting 300 of the Youth Summer Employment Programme (YSEP) participants, to assist in the data gathering process to determine the necessity of the shelters that have remained open since the passage of Hurricane Melissa. Hon. Desmond McKenzie, Minister of Local Government and Community Development made the announcement during a Special Press Briefing at the Office of the Prime Minister on Tuesday morning (Nov. 11, 2025).
“Next week, we will be putting some 300 workers of the Youth Summer Employment Programme to go into the affected areas to do an actual count of the numbers of persons in the shelters and once that is done, we will take a determination how many shelters we will be closing down or how many shelters must remain in operation,” Minister McKenzie said.
“The purpose of the exercise with the YSEP workers… is to collect the data to give ourselves a better opportunity to do to the assessment that is needed. The ODPEM the Ministry of Labour and Social Security and the local authorities have a vested interest in ensuring that the number of persons that we are providing for are the genuine people that really need the relief supplies,” he continued.
The Minister revealed that once the assessment concludes, the government will move into collective phase where a decision will be made to help alleviate the discomfort experienced by residents whose homes were destroyed in the hurricane.
This process is expected to work in tandem with the government’s Temporary Housing Programme, which is geared towards housing citizens who have been displaced by the disaster as recovery efforts continue.
YSEP was launched in 2017 and has employed more than 50,000 Jamaican youth during the summer period over the span of nine years. Some of these participants have secured permanent employment within the local government system. The three hundred workers who will participate in this data collection project will be selected from a cohort of trained past participants from several parishes.