African countries join the patent game

Africans are looking around the world and realizing that intellectual property protection is important and key to guarding one's intangible property. African countries are starting to collaborate and share resources for IP protection. In a publicly heated debate; Starbucks coffee corporation was trying to patent Ethiopia coffee brands. However, to the chagrin of Starbucks, Ethiopia won this debate and Starbucks agreed to pay the country of Ethiopia royalty rights. This issue wouldn't have even occurred if Ethiopia, or the African Union had a strong patent or intellectual property law.

From Science and Development Network

Researchers in six African countries can now better protect their rights and benefit from the commercialisation of their research as a result of a project to improve their countries' capacity to address intellectual property issues.

Researchers from 22 health and medical research institutes in Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and the Republic of Congo have benefited from a three-year project to build an intellectual property 'hub' through which they share resources to process patent applications and commercialise research results.

The project — the Virtual Communal Intellectual Property Service (SECOVIPI) project — was initiated by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the Geneva International Academic Network (GIAN).

Meso Finance: the next area of financing for SME's in Africa

There's been a lot of talk on micro-finance and it's impact with the base of pyramid market (BOP). Dr. Muhammad Yunus's non-profit Grameen bank was the first to commercialize micro-finance in Bangladesh, now everyone from Latin America, India and Africa are copying this model. Micro-finance works well and helps the improvished and especially women sustain a living.

However, there is a flaw is micro-finance. Micro-finance as the name suggest, is about utilizing small amounts of financing usually $50 to $500 or start a small business. But what if your a farmer in rural Mali, Sudan, Zambia, or Kenya who has hundreds of plots of land and you need heavy machinery to till, or sow your land? Where do you get financing to purchase a Kubota, John Deere, or Caterpillar equipment? Micro-financing is simply not the solution in this case, farming equipment on average costs about $30,000 to $500,000.

The type of financing needed in most developing markets is in the small medium enterprise space (SME), another name for this type of financing is called Meso-Financing. Meso finance is above micro-finance and below traditional finance like; bank loans, and venture capital. Meso means middle and most aspiring SME's fall into this category. There is now a small movement under foot to harvest funds to finance and help the SME market.

I belong to the DC chapter of International Private Enterprise Group (IPEG), and we had our monthly event Aug 2 at the World Resource Institute (WRI) about meso financing. Ricardo Teran and Ben Powell spoke about how their non-profit Agora Partnerships helps entreprenuers in Latin America with Meso-financing. They are so successful that entrepreneurs are making money, hiring more workers and changing the mind-set of doing business in Latin America.

I myself, am involved with starting a Meso finance fund for Africa. In the next few months I will give you an update on what the fund will be doing and who I'm working with in establishing this fund.