Research

Par : Abdelhamid Benhmade Le Colloque de Yaoundé, 2019, est organisé par l’Université Catholique d’Afrique Centrale, en partenariat avec l’Institut Universitaire d’Abidjan et l’Université Toulouse Capitole....

The WIPO-IGC recently commenced the next installment of its deliberations for a text-based instrument that focuses on the protection of traditional cultural expressions (TCEs), pursuant to its mandate. There are two scheduled forums on TCEs beginning Feb 27-March 3 and to be completed in June 2017, which will round off the Committee’s work for the 2016-17 biennium.

On 10 June 2015, the Agreement establishing a Tripartite Free Trade Area (TFTA) was signed in Egypt bringing together 26 African countries from three major regional blocs: the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), the East African Community (EAC), and the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Following the signing, the current phase of the TFTA negotiations are meant to cover five agenda items: trade in services, cooperation in trade and development, competition policy, intellectual property (IP) rights, and cross-border investment. The fourth of those five issues was the subject of the second Open AIR East Africa Distinguished Speaker Series presentation by Dr. Henry Kibet Mutai.

By Menna Badreldin It is challenging to quantify a phenomenon in the same method across countries. Indices are generally a tool to represent a certain...

Earlier this year, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) held a two-day workshop on “Supporting Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises Use the Intellectual Property System in Their Competitive Strategy” at the Academy of Scientific Research and Technology in Cairo, Egypt, which some of our Open AIR NERG members attended. The goal of this meeting was to discuss how to encourage young innovators to protect their inventions by patenting them at the Egyptian Patent Office. The workshop had vibrant and sometimes heated discussions between these innovators and government officials regarding many of the obstacles faced in the patenting process in Egypt.

By Chidi Oguamanam MAPC-ABS Canada 2003 Workshop and Retreat May 15-16: The Maritime Aboriginal Peoples Council (MAPC) and ABS Canada concluded their 2023 Annual Retreat and...

Principal Investigators:  A/Prof. Dick Kawooya, School of Information Science, University of South Carolina, USA, Kawooya@sc.edu    A/Prof. Tobias Schonwetter, Department of Commercial Law, University of Cape Town,...

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 Sileshi Hirko Putting Africa at the Forefront in Digital Economies Central to the flourishing digital economies, the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the...

The “Makers” who come together to tinker and hack in the maker collectives of South Africa’s Gauteng Province display a wide range of innovation practices, our research for Open AIR has found. Our study, Collaboration and Appropriation in Gauteng Makerspaces, investigated the activities of eight Gauteng maker collectives. The findings have now been published in Open AIR Working Paper 6, entitled The Maker Movement in Gauteng Province, South Africa.