History
The foundation of the ATU dates back to 1977 when its mission was a part of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), which has since been replaced by the African Union (AU). The ATU was officially formed in 1999 as the successor to the Pan-African Telecommunications Union (PATU) and is headquartered in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, but due to war, the ATU has relocated to Nairobi, Kenya. At this time, the organization slightly transformed from primarily a coordinating body for government related activity to include private and public stakeholders in the information and telecommunications technology sector. The ATU now enforces a constitution and has added a secretary general along with a technical management team to ensure a more effective transformation from the PATU. Currently, the ATU attempts to provide a collaborative atmosphere for public and private stakeholders to formulate and negotiate policies that might increase the role of Africa in the booming environment of ICT. So, while the PATU previously only allowed public membership of government’s, the ATU now allows organizations from the private sector to become associate members.
Read more about this topic: African Telecommunications Union
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)