Janiel McEwan | Sending Home [Part I]: The Lifeline

EDITOR'S NOTE: For Jamaicans across the world, sending money home has always been about far more than money. In Part One of this two-part series, we trace the deep human and historical roots of Jamaica’s remittance story, from the Panama canal workers of the early twentieth century, through the Windrush generation, to the formalisation of a lifeline that today amounts to more than 15 per cent of the island’s GDP. These flows sustain households, keep children in school, and honour the dead. They are, as one executive puts it, the monthly affidavit of belonging. Part Two will examine how the digital revolution is transforming the way that obligation is fulfilled, and what may be gained, or quietly lost, in the shift.

For Jamaicans abroad, sending money home has never been just about money.

In a living room in May Pen, Clarendon, one December evening not so long ago, Miss Mavis sat forward on her settee while the television cast a blue glow across the walls. On the screen, her brother, greyer now, thicker around the middle, waved from a studio somewhere in Brooklyn and launched into an off-key rendition of ‘Jingle Bells’. She had not seen his face in 30 years. The monthly transfers he sent kept the lights on and the children in school, but this moment was different. The programme was called Greetings Across the World, and for families like hers, it had become a Christmas ritual as reliable as the postman or the sound of rain on a zinc roof.

That ritual began in 1987, the brainchild of a man named Clarence Royes, an engineer, television producer, and filmmaker who understood that money alone was never enough. 

As someone who was present from the beginning, Emile Spence watched the programme take shape from inside Jamaica National, where he was among the early movers who built and deepened the organisation’s ties to the diaspora. He remembers the early days with remarkable clarity, and how the programme transformed a simple financial transaction into something recognisably human. 

Royes often said that even after all of them were gone, the programme would remain. Spence repeated the line with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had lived long enough to watch the prediction come true.

Now in its 39th season, the show still airs every Christmas. Families living across the Jamaican diaspora record greetings that are broadcast back home. Grandmothers sing hymns from small church halls in London. Children recite poems while nervously clutching cue cards in Toronto. Fathers shout greetings to entire districts in St Elizabeth or Portland, while laughing relatives crowd behind them, some with the faint lilt of a British or North American accent. 

These clips cross the Atlantic to illuminate living rooms across Jamaica during the holiday season. It is not merely advertising. It functions as something deeper, a quiet infrastructure of the heart that reinforces the emotional bonds migration has stretched across oceans.

MONTHLY AFFIDAVIT OF BELONGING

Remittances themselves have always carried meanings that go far beyond the money being transferred. They are, in many ways, the monthly affidavit of belonging.

Paulette Simpson, executive for corporate affairs and public policy for The Jamaica National Group in the United Kingdom, has spent much of her life observing that calculation from both sides of the Atlantic. Born in Britain to Jamaican parents and raised in Manchester, Jamaica by her grandmother, Simpson rose to become then deputy chief executive of JN Bank UK, an institution whose landmark UK banking licence had been secured under the leadership of Earl Jarrett, chief executive officer of The Jamaica National Group. 

In recognition of her work with Caribbean communities, Simpson was awarded the title Commander of the Order of the British Empire. When she speaks about remittances, she does so with the authority of someone who has personally experienced the emotional complexity of migration.

She explained that the obligation to send money home is deeply real, but so too are the feelings of love and guilt that sometimes accompany it.

People leave because circumstances demand it; yet the connection to home never truly disappears. Each transfer represents a quiet message that says the family left behind has not been forgotten. The financial transaction becomes a continuing conversation between those who migrated and those who remained.

That conversation is older than any modern remittance company. It stretches back more than a century. 

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Jamaican labourers who crossed to Panama to dig the canal or to Cuba to cut cane, sent home what people in the region came to call “Panama money” – wages folded into letters, slipped into the hands of returning travellers, or trusted to a cousin boarding a ship.

The practice continued with the Windrush generation. From the late 1940s onward, men and women who boarded ships for Britain tucked cash into envelopes or asked friends flying home to carry a little extra. These informal networks, built on reputation, family ties, and the quiet honour of people who knew each other, worked for a time.

By the 1980s, the volume had grown too large for them to bear. Jamaica was then deep in the throes of structural adjustment. The economy had been battered by debt, devaluation, and austerity. Jobs were scarce, prices were rising, and the informal systems that had once carried small sums safely began to buckle under the weight placed on them. Delays stretched into weeks, packages went missing, and families who depended on those transfers found themselves choosing between food and medicine. What had begun as a trickle of support from Panama had become something closer to a lifeline.

THE SCALE OF THAT LIFELINE

Today the numbers tell the scale of that lifeline. In 2025, Jamaicans living abroad sent home a record US$3.49 billion, according to the Bank of Jamaica, an increase of 3.8 per cent over the previous year despite the disruptions of Hurricane Melissa.

That figure amounts to roughly 15.3 per cent of Jamaica’s gross domestic product and regularly exceeds foreign direct investment. Two out of every three dollars originated in the United States. The United Kingdom accounted for about 12.5 per cent of the total, while Canada contributed close to 8.9 per cent. Even the comparatively small but tightly knit Jamaican community in the Cayman Islands sent home about 6.9 per cent of the total flows.

These figures reveal the reach of Jamaica’s global diaspora, yet statistics alone cannot fully capture the texture of what remittances mean in everyday life. Behind each number is a decision made late at night at a kitchen table in Queens, Brixton or Toronto. It is the moment someone pauses to calculate what portion of a pay cheque can be spared. It is the quiet act of placing money in an envelope or pressing the confirmation button on a transfer screen while thinking of family waiting thousands of miles away.

In the 1980s, those same flows were still measured in the low hundreds of millions of dollars each year, perhaps a tenth of today’s volume, yet they were already keeping households afloat when the formal economy could not. Jamaica’s remittance-to-GDP ratio remains among the highest in the Caribbean, a distinction born of necessity as much as scale.

Jamaica National did not create the need for remittances, but it played a significant role in formalising the trust that allowed those transfers to become more secure. From its first offices in Britain through to a network spanning London, New York, Florida, Toronto, and the Cayman Islands, the organisation built something that mattered to migrants: a place that understood what the money actually meant.

SHIFT FROM INFORMAL TO FORMAL

The shift from informal to formal was not simply institutional progress; it was a response to the pressure that had built up over decades. Families who had once waited anxiously for a barrel or a trusted courier, now had receipts, reliable timelines, and the quiet dignity of knowing the money would arrive intact.

Almost every Jamaican family has experienced one side of this transaction. The relative who leaves carries the weight of expectation. The relative who remains receives not only the funds but also the daily reminder that someone abroad continues to invest in their future. 

That investment often takes the shape of a child’s schooling. Remittances let a father in Atlanta or an aunt in Birmingham keep playing the traditional role of breadwinner even from across the ocean. School fees get paid, uniforms bought, textbooks shipped in barrels. The money arrives like a quiet promise: you are not forgotten, and your future is still being built.

In Jamaican households it is the uncle or godfather abroad who steps in when local wages fall short, turning migration into a collective stake in the next generation. Without that support, many children would drop out of school; with it, some go on to university or trade school, carrying forward the hopes of the entire family and, by extension, the island itself.

The same thread of support runs through the hardest moments. When a parent or sibling dies, the expected contribution does not end. Remittances soften the blow, covering funeral costs, helping with the nine-night, ensuring the family can send their loved one home with the dignity the community expects. In a culture where a proper send-off upholds everyone’s standing, those transfers become one more way of saying the bond survives even death. 

[Continues in Part II: The Digital Crossing]

- Janiel McEwan is an economist. Email feedback to janielmcewan17@gmail.com and columns@gleanerjm.com