World Intellectual Property Organisation opens African office

The development comes three years after the 2016 WIPO Assemblies, where it was decided that WIPO would make inroads into Africa through the establishment of offices on the continent. Algeria was one of the countries to receive an endorsement from WIPO over such countries as Morocco, Tunisia and Kenya. 

It is the body’s first external office on the continent and the sixth overall. Other sites with offices include Brazil, China, Japan, Russia and Singapore.

External offices, says WIPO, “are designed to promote access for member states and other stakeholders to the organisation’s intellectual property [IP] services that help innovators and creators protect and promote their products in export markets”.

The office is headed by Mohamed Saleck Ahmed Ethmane, who is designated as the WIPO Algeria office director. He assumed the office at the end of February when he was handed a set of keys by Kheireddine Medjoubi, secretary-general of his country’s Ministry of Industry and Mines.

Prior to the creation of the new office, WIPO already had several African countries – including Liberia, Kenya, Nigeria, Cameroon and Sierra Leone – as members, providing support, technical assistance and capacity building to national establishments located in those countries.

Such support was delivered primarily through WIPO’s regional bureau for Africa, which is mandated to develop “national IP strategies to cater to the needs and gaps in the areas of policy and legislative frameworks, institutional and technical infrastructure and human resource capacity building while at the same time leveraging the potential of IP in priority areas as defined in national development plans”.

As managed by Sery-Kore Marc, the bureau is also involved in “translating the notion of intellectual property for development into concrete, tangible results and benefits, through innovative, cross-cutting intellectual property based projects”.

With the new development, some of the functions and activities of the Africa bureau could be channeled through the external office in Algeria. WIPO is yet to publicly state the relationship between the existing bureau and its “first overseas representation on the African continent”.

Nonetheless, WIPO has said that its member states endorsed the creation of external offices to assist the global body in delivering its duties.