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

Innovation & Intellectual Property
Respondents were also asked to provide information about:
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whether their country was a member of an African regional IP organisation
(i.e. ARIPO or OAPI) and whether membership in that organisation was
helping to support the patent examination process in their country;
whether their country was a member of the PCT, and if so, whether patent
examinations conducted by the PCT in Geneva were final and binding on
their country’s national patent office; and
the extent of public, online access to national patent filings.
3. The findings
The research findings revealed a patchwork of approaches to the issue of patent
law administration in the African states from which responses were received.
Most of the approaches were found to be based on colonial antecedents, while
only a few reflected modest improvements on the status quo since the colonial
era. In the vast majority of the states surveyed, most patent applications filed
were drafted by foreign patent lawyers, examined at the PCT Office in Geneva,
and mailed to African capital cities simply for filing. In only a few countries was
there found to be some domestic infrastructure and capacity for examination of
patents, via national patent offices or via the regional patent organisation ARIPO.
The vast majority of states surveyed continued to rely on foreign examination
for domestic registration of patents – in spite of statutory provisions, in the vast
majority of the countries surveyed, for local inspection of patent applications (see
Appendix).
The research also found a near-total lack of capacity to electronically store and
disseminate patents filings for the use of follow-on innovators and other stakeholders.
Thus, in the majority of the countries surveyed, regardless of whether
the national patent office examined patent applications, the patent office was not
equipped to readily disseminate patent filings to interested stakeholders, i.e. the
technical and scientific information contained in patent applications was not publicly
available. It was also found that membership in the aforementioned regional
IP bodies ARIPO and OAPI was not substantially ameliorating the infrastructural
deficiencies in the administration of patent law in most of the countries
surveyed. It was also found that two of Africa’s leading economies, South Africa
and Nigeria, did not require local patent examination, and that most of the stakeholders
surveyed, including many of the IP lawyers, were not concerned about
the issue. The education and training of IP lawyers in Africa does not seem to be
instilling a desire to rethink or change the status quo with regard to patent filing
on the continent.
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