Metrics Laws & Policies

The intellectual property system is a crucial part of economic policymaking worldwide. It affects matters of profound importance, including health, education, nutrition, culture, science, technology and innovation policy. One might assume, therefore, that the global governance of intellectual property rights rests on a solid foundation of evidence. Think again. For over a century, intellectual property policy has been based largely on theoretical assumptions and political lobbying.

This 2013 book is the product of three years of literature reviews, expert interviews and scenario-building exercises by the Open AIR network. The authors trace the contours of knowledge and innovation in Africa from the founding civilisations to today’s current realities, and then set out the drivers of change that can be expected to shape innovation systems on the continent between now and the year 2035.

By Uchenna Felicia Ugwu In September 2017, the Thabo Mbeki Foundation and the Centre for Human Rights (CHR), Faculty of Law University of Pretoria gathered together...

By Sarah El Saeed The Egyptian Government has begun in pushing through a fiscal and monetary reform plan that includes various unpopular austerity measures. In...

Authored by: Jeremy de Beer Abstract: Governments have long been interested in making intellectual property (IP) policy based on sound evidence. There is a large...

This 2010 edited volume, Access to Knowledge in Africa: The Role of Copyright, has chapters outlining the African Copyright and Access to Knowledge (ACA2K) network’s research findings on the copyright environments of eight African countries.

By Helen Chuma-Okoro and Nicole Tumaine This is part two of Helen Chuma-Okoro and Nicole Tumaine’s blog post on the insights retained from 2018 conferences,...

Mr. Sileshi Hirko, a PhD candidate in the Common Law Section of the University of Ottawa, has won the Civil Society Scholars Award (CSSA)....

Authored by: Caroline Ncube. This chapter provides an historical account of the development of IP on the African continent which highlights how the introduction of IP systems and their transposed legislation displaced existing knowledge governance systems and entrenched a primarily extractor-biased IP system.

By Nicole Tumaine Over the past four months, I have had the privilege of attending three international conferences as a panelist thanks to the generous...