AFRIPI

Under the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO) Patent Examination Training programme (ARPET), AfrIPI, ARIPO and the European Patent Office (EPO) partnered together to train patent examiners of the national patent offices of ARIPO Member States.

The residential training programme was held in Zanzibar, Tanzania, from 11-15 July 2022 with approximately 40 participants.

The objective of the training programme was to develop the knowledge and skills of patent examiners of ARIPO Member States.

The APERT programme included the following topics:

On 27 to 29 September 2022, a consultative workshop to support the reform of the legislative framework for protecting copyright and related rights took place in Equatorial Guinea.  This event took place as a follow-up of the consultative workshop to support the establishment of a structure for the collective management of copyright and related rights was held on March 25 and 26, 2022 in Equatorial Guinea.

On 18-20 April 2022, a sub-regional workshop of the Commission of the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), together with the ‘Intellectual Property Rights and Innovation in Africa’ project (AfrIPI), was held in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo. The workshop addressed the role of intellectual property in market integration and the strategic relevance of the AfCFTA protocol on intellectual property.

This first meeting of this activity aimed at:

On 27 and 28 April 2022, the African Regional Intellectual Property Organisation (ARIPO) and AfrIPI hosted a promotional workshop on Designs and Utility Models at ARIPO in Harare, Zimbabwe.

This workshop aimed to raise awareness, provide training and promote the ARIPO regional system on industrial designs and utility models, in line with ARIPO’s mission of ‘fostering creativity and innovation for economic growth in Africa’. Additionally, examiners from ARIPO explained the examination and registration system and requirements under the Harare Protocol.

The African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO), in collaboration with the World Intellectual Property Organization, are delivering a comprehensive Intellectual Property (IP) Master’s Programme in English to three universities in Africa: the Africa University in Zimbabwe, the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Ghana and the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) in Tanzania.

In the last decade, the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) has worked very closely with the European Union’s Member States IP offices to develop IT tools that help the offices work more efficiently and make IP information freely available to the public in an open and transparent way. These tools were shared with the ARIPO Member States through a Workshop on the Integration and Implementation of IP tools. It took place on 21 and 22 June 2022 in Harare, Zimbabwe.

The Africa IP SME Helpdesk supports small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs') from the European Union (EU) to both protect and enforce their Intellectual Property (IP) rights in/or relating to Africa by providing free information and services. 

The African Regional Intellectual Property Organisation (ARIPO) ad hoc working group on Geographical Indications (GIs) was held online on 22 March 2022 in Harare, Zimbabwe.

This meeting was the first in its series. It aimed to reset the scene and create a subgroup of the ad hoc working group on GIs to achieve the expected results and present them at the next Administrative Council.

World Intellectual Property Day is celebrated every 26 April to increase intellectual property (IP) awareness. World IP Day is an opportunity to highlight the role that IP rights (patents, utility models, industrial designs, trade marks, and copyright) play in encouraging innovation and creativity.