Ethiopian Intellectual Property Office

The Ethiopian Intellectual Property Office (EIPO) is an autonomous unit of the Ethiopian Science and Technology Agency. It was established in 2003 to provide legal protection for intellectual property (IP) rights.Under a Director-General the EIPO comprises five core business units and two support units. Besides legal protection, the EIPO office is also charged with the mandate to collect, organize and disseminate technological information contained in patent documents and encourage its utilizations.

The roles of the office are to; to receive application for patent and trademark registration certificate and give appropriate decisions after undertaking or causing to be undertaken the necessary examination in accordance with the relevant law. To follow up the exploitation of legally protected foreign and local inventions and issue compulsory licenses when necessary as well as to receive search requests and render search services to determine the existence of similar inventions prior to an application for a patent is filed or before a research activity to solve a technical problem is undertaken.