When 226 % of GDP Blew Away

“The International Monetary Fund (IMF) ranked Dominica as the country that suffered the
worst natural disasters between 1980 and 2017 (Hurricane Maria) based on sustained
damage, estimated at 226% of gross domestic product.”

On the night of 18 September 2017, Category-5 Hurricane Maria shredded Dominica’s roads, power lines and rooftops, wiping out an estimated 226 percent of the island’s GDP. Within weeks, more than 20 bilateral and multilateral donors had launched separate recovery projects. An ACAPS lessons-learned review later noted overlapping surveys, duplicated aid drops and “limited visibility of who was doing what, where.”

The Pain Points

• No single source of truth. Government, UN clusters and NGOs all kept their own spreadsheets.

• Delayed fund flows. Differing reporting templates slowed donor disbursements.

• Community priorities lost. Village councillors complained that roofing material arrived in the wrong districts while other parishes waited.

How EMPHASIS Would Have Helped

1. Unified Project Workspace – one cloud-based Gantt shared by every donor, colour-coded by SDG target and parish.

2. Geotagged Damage Registry – field teams upload photos that auto-populate priority scores and procurement lots.

3. Milestone-Triggered Disbursements – real-time alerts send green lights to finance desks the moment a target is met.

Dominica’s resilience drive proves goodwill is not enough; coordination is the real force-multiplier. Ready to see SISA sync every dollar, every roof, every day? Book a 30-minute demo.