Geographical Indication (GI) options for Ethiopian Coffee and Ghanaian Cocoa

African Patent Offices Not Fit for Purpose
documents in the Abuja Patent Office clearly undermined its ability to serve as a
collator and disseminator of patent information for societal (including follow-on
inventor) use. I came to wonder whether the situation in Abuja was reflective of a
widespread state of affairs in the African continent. This research study emerged
as an effort to test the situation across several African states.
The study was primarily conducted through a questionnaire administered
(via email and phone) to key patent stakeholders in more than 40 countries, with
the stakeholders including: experienced patent lawyers, administrators in patent
offices, users of patent offices and selected inventors. Survey responses were
received from 44 countries (see Appendix for listing of the countries and the number
of respondents in each country). The study also generated data via site visits
to patent offices and exploratory interviews with some of the stakeholders who
responded to the survey. The research also required doctrinal analysis of legal
texts in each country, to determine which countries’ statutes provide for domestic
examination of patent applications (this data is provided in the Appendix).
The research was tightly focused on understanding the degree to which
national patent offices were delivering on their statutory mandates. The survey and
interviews were thus limited to questions of whether the patent offices were conducting
substantive examination of both domestic and international patent filings,
and whether the offices were collating the patent information and making it accessible
to the public. (A potential weakness of the research was that not all patent
offices in African states were surveyed – largely as a result of the unwillingness or
inability of stakeholders to respond to the questionnaires either by way of emails
or phone calls. There were eight countries from which responses were not received:
Botswana, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Djibouti, Mauritania,
Niger, São Tomé and Principe, and Swaziland. However, responses were received
from the vast majority of the countries of Africa (44 out of 55), as well as the two
African regional bodies dealing with patents, the African Regional Intellectual
Property Organisation (ARIPO) and the Organisation africaine de la propriété
intellectuelle (OAPI). Many Anglophone African states are members of ARIPO,
headquartered in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, while many Francophone
African states are organised under OAPI, based in Yaoundé, Cameroon. The research
also sought evidence of influence from the international, Geneva-based patent
examination regime aligned to the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT). The two key
questions posed by the survey questionnaire and in interviews were as follows:
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Does your country’s patent law provide for examination of patent
applications?
Does your country have patent examiners employed for the examination
of patent applications?
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