Wanted: SEARCA's Reinvention & Transformation After First 50 Years

The top image is from the cover, the lower image is from page 76 of the 90-page coffee-table book SEARCA's First Fifty Years (Pushing The Frontiers Of Agricultural And Rural Development) of the Southeast Asia Regional Center for Graduate Study & Research in Agriculture, published in 2016. Reinvention and Transformation are what I expected to have happened between birth and golden year. The book is full of information, but does not point out clearly SEARCA's necessary reinvention and transformation.

That is what I would have put into the pages of that commemorative book if I were the writer; thus:

The story of SEARCA from idea to
institutional innovator to implementor.

These 2 searching questions would have occupied me:

(1)   What did SEARCA reinvent in the conduct of graduate studies and researches in Southeast Asia?

(2)   What specific transformations occurred as outputs and impacts of graduate education and research results disseminated in the 11 member countries: Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam?

That book was published in 2016. To establish credentials, let me point out that in 2012, I was the writer, editor, photographer and layout artist of a million-peso coffee-table book with this layer of titles (mine):

The Filipino Farmer Is Bankable
Celebrating 25 Years Of The ACPC
Serving The Credit Needs Of Small Farmer And Fisher Households Of The Philippines

Already, those 24 words summarized and made the report remarkable.

The ACPC is the Agricultural Credit Policy Council of the Philippines. Executive Director Jovita Corpuz recruited me after asking just 1 question: "Can you do it?" I said, "Yes," even if the schedule was very tight: 3 months to the Silver Anniversary of ACPC on April 25. I delivered on that date a 144-page book full of photographs, half of them mine.

I wrote the ACPC book with 4 major parts:
1. Realizations
2. Reinventions
3. Recognitions
4. Reflections.

Those 4 guided me in writing out the whole ACPC story, and putting photographs amidst texts.

I am not excited with the Beginning & End of the Story as written in SEARCA's First Fifty Years. The answers to these simple questions would have made it beautiful and valuable:

How stood graduate study and research in Southeast Asia in 1966?
What happened after 10 years?
What happened after 20 years?
What happened after 30 years?
What happened after 40 years?
What happened after 50 years?

To help answer those questions, let us be clear about the mandate of SEARCA. The coffee-table book says:

SEARCA is mandated to strengthen institutional capacities in agricultural and rural development in Southeast Asia through graduate education, short-term training, research, and knowledge exchange.

Now then, what were those institutional capacities, what were their weaknesses and how were they strengthened within those 50 years? What were the graduate studies? What were the short-term trainings conducted, and how many participants? What were the researches conducted in all those 50 years – a 10-page summary would have been excellent. What knowledge exchanges happened?

I believe a revision is not too late.@517