Fernando Dos Santos is Director-General of the African Regional Intellectual Property Organisation (ARIPO) in Harare. Before taking the leadership of ARIPO in January 2013, he was Director-General of Mozambique’s Industrial Property Institute (IPI), within the Ministry of Trade and Industry. He is a also a Tutor at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) Worldwide Academy, Geneva, and a former Lecturer in Law at Eduardo Mondlane University (UEM) and the Technical University of Mozambique, Maputo.

Dos Santos was a member of the Mozambique Team for the Open AIR’s precursor network, African Copyright and Access to Knowledge (ACA2K), from 2007 to 2010, and was an author of the ACA2K Mozambique Country Report. He joined Open AIR at its inception in 2011, and was one of the researchers and authors of the case study published in 2014 as The State of Biofuel Innovation in Mozambique. Dos Santos gave a keynote presentation on Africa and Appropriate Technologies at the combined 3rd Global Congress on IP & the Public Interest and Open AIR Conference on Innovation & IP in Africa in Cape Town in 2013.