His Excellency Mr. Elias M. Magosi, Executive Secretary for the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and Mr. Bemanya Twebaze, the Director-General for the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on the 30th July 2024. The Signing Ceremony was held on the margins of the SADC Industrialisation Week in Harare, Republic of Zimbabwe.
ARIPO is an intergovernmental organization established in 1976 which facilitates cooperation among its Member States in intellectual property (IP) matters. The role of ARIPO is to pool resources together for the promotion, development, and harmonisation of the intellectual property laws and policies of ARIPO Member States. The objective of ARIPO is to establish common services and organs for IP coordination, development, and harmonisation.
The MoU is meant to strengthen the collaboration between SADC Secretariat and ARIPO in enhancing and strengthening the protection of Intellectual Property Rights in the Region. Intellectual Property (IP) have become a widely used tool in many developed and developing countries to drive the development and industrialisation process to enhance national and regional creativity and innovation, encourage investment in research and development and to create new technologically.
During the signing ceremony, H.E. Mr. Magosi hailed the signing as a significant milestone for the region because it provided an opportunity to strengthen the regional intellectual property rights systems as well as the science, technology, and innovation systems, with the goal of encouraging innovation, research, and development to drive the region's industrialisation process. He said the Member States have recognised the need for a regional approach to Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) to provide a foundation for them to benefit from Intellectual Property Rights in support of their development goals as well as the regional economic integration.
Mr. Twebaze highlighted that signing of the MoU between the SADC and ARIPO represents a significant step in strengthening intellectual property frameworks within the region. He explained that the purpose of the MoU is to provide a framework of cooperation and facilitate collaboration between the two organisations in the Intellectual Property and create cooperation and collaboration in strengthening and developing human and institutional capacities in IP in support of industrialisation in the region.
He noted that of the 22 members of ARIPO, 11 of them are SADC Member States, namely, Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, United Republic of Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
The SADC Members States, through a variety of SADC instruments have realised the need for a regional approach to Intellectual Property Rights to provide a basis for Member States to beneficially utilise IPRs in support of their development goals as well as SADC economic integration. Such an approach enables SADC Member States to extract maximum value from Intellectual Property Rights for them to catch up with the most advanced countries globally in the areas of trade, science, technology and innovation and socio-economic development and competitiveness.
