Why UPAA needs an Ilonggo builder like Junie Pama

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

Voting in the University of the Philippines Alumni Association elections opened on June 18 and runs through August 6.

Most members will not bother to cast a ballot.

That apathy is the real story behind this election.

The University of the Philippines trains a large share of the country’s judges, scientists, doctors, legislators, and civil servants, yet its alumni network too often behaves like a reunion committee rather than a national institution.

Into that gap steps Artemio “Junie” Pama, Jr., an Ilonggo executive seeking a seat on the UPAA board for the 2026 to 2029 term.

His candidacy deserves attention for a reason that has nothing to do with sentiment.

Pama is offering the association something it has long needed and rarely gotten, which is a builder rather than a figurehead.

Consider what he has actually built.

He is a product of the university he wants to serve, having earned his management degree from UP in 1985.

For more than 30 years since, he has run companies, not committees.

He held senior posts at Smart Communications, Globe Telecom, Broadband Philippines, and Bayan Telecommunications during the years that wired the archipelago for mobile and internet service.

He later served as country head for the global technology firms Five9, Nice inContact, and KiuGlobal, helping them establish and scale operations in the Philippine market.

Today he is managing director and general manager of Quantum Digital Services, a managed services provider partnered with Converge ICT that is expanding connectivity across Panay and Boracay.

That record is the heart of his case, because it is a career spent extending digital infrastructure into places the market was slow to reach.

His regional credibility is not borrowed either, as he chairs the UPV Foundation, Inc., which channels private support into the University of the Philippines Visayas, alongside other institutional roles in Iloilo.

A board member who has built operations in the provinces, not merely attended meetings in Quezon City, would change who the association listens to.

His platform reads like the work of someone who thinks in systems.

It proposes a unified global alumni database, a mobile app for mentoring and job matching, and an innovation hub that would link alumni investors to UP startups.

It promises research grants aimed at climate resilience and regional development, with explicit weight given to Western Visayas.

It calls for an alumni volunteer corps that deploys lawyers, doctors, and engineers to disaster zones rather than staging one-off outreach.

Strip away the buzzwords, and the throughline is decentralization.

For decades, the gravity of UP’s alumni power has pulled toward Diliman and Manila, leaving regional chapters to fend for themselves.

This is where the stakes widen beyond alumni nostalgia.

UP is a public university, funded by Filipino taxpayers from Basco to Bongao, and the talent it concentrates is a national resource that the regions rarely get to keep.

An alumni network that finally took the provinces seriously could fund scholarships in underserved towns, anchor research in regional economies, and slow the quiet drain of skilled Ilonggos to Manila and abroad.

That is the public-interest case, and it does not require knowing Pama personally to find it persuasive.

The honest objection is that ambitious platforms are cheap.

Every candidate promises mentorship programs, dashboards, and endowment drives, and most of those promises die on contact with the reality of volunteer-run organizations.

Twenty programs across seven pillars is a great deal to deliver, and skepticism is warranted.

But notice where Pama’s plan ends.

Its final pillar is governance, calling for a strategic roadmap spanning three to five years, clear performance targets, and a professionalized secretariat to reduce the association’s dependence on goodwill alone.

That is not the language of a man selling a dream but someone who has run organizations for three decades and knows that vision without execution is just a slideshow.

His career is the strongest evidence on this point, because it is a record of operations that had to work, not slogans that only had to sound good.

None of this guarantees that a single board seat can transform a sprawling alumni body, and readers should resist the temptation to expect miracles.

A board is a collective, and one voice, however capable, can be outvoted or worn down.

But direction is set by who sits at the table, and the UPAA table has too few people who have built anything outside the capital.

Voting is open now, and members in good standing as of July 27 may cast a ballot by mail, in person, or by proxy.

UP alumni who want their association to mean something beyond an annual homecoming have a clear choice in front of them.

Send a builder.