Like many African entrepreneurs, I set out in business to develop solutions to the challenges that lie on our doorstep. Many countries in Africa face challenges that are uniquely African, posing a threat to life chances and holding back economic development. Supporting individuals who have great ideas and who come to the fore with innovations that deliver solutions is therefore extremely important. An enormous amount has changed over recent years in the drive towards identifying and supporting innovators – giving them the tools and capital to succeed. However, there is one issue that many aspiring inventors and entrepreneurs may fail to plan for and that must be discussed: the protection of intellectual property.
Protecting your idea is especially important in a region that lacks a cohesive intellectual property policy or framework. It is perhaps even more important in a part of the world where there are so many new ideas and products, created by young innovators – young people who may be ill-prepared for talks with investors or venture capital companies. Being a businessman is an admirable aspiration that millions of young Africans share – but that reality also provides great hunting ground for investors or competitors looking to take advantage of young dreams.
As a young innovator, my idea was to develop an affordable organic fertilizer that could improve yields for farmers who toil away on harsh land and are forced to pay huge costs for commercial fertilizer. Expensive fertilizer, which is often produced abroad and imported. Owing to such high costs, farmers can typically only afford cheap, synthetic, and acidulated fertilizer varieties that are bad for the environment. In many areas where the soil is inherently acidic, use of acidulated fertilizers can lead to long-term soil degradation and yield loss, at about four percent per year.
Safi Organics Limited is the name of my company, which provides farmers with a low-cost fertilizer made from purely organic products and waste from farm harvests. It is designed to improve yields for farmers by up to 30 percent whilst also being less harmful to the environment. The product uses biochar-based fertilizer which can counteract soil acidity, retaining nutrients and moisture in the soil. Additionally, the carbon-rich fertilizer removes carbon from the atmosphere by at least 2.2 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per acre of farm per year.
I am proud that I have created something that is a great business model that (most importantly) changes African lives for the better. Part of the success of that model – the development of biochar-based fertilizers – is its affordability. So, it was important for me to ensure that I protected my intellectual property to maintain control over costs and pricing strategy.
I began by Googling it. The concept of intellectual property rights was relatively new to me but I stumbled across the Kenya Industrial Property Institute, which pointed me in the right direction. Its functions are to administer industrial property rights, provide technological information to the public, promote inventiveness in Kenya and provide training on industrial property. Through the Institute, not only did I learn how to register a trademark, I also learned that the costs attached to it are relatively high for newcomers. Organizations such as this are a lifeline for innovators and in Kenya we are particularly lucky in having access. Despite this however, there was little support in learning how to prepare for the process – particularly in respect of preparing documentary evidence that the innovation is real and that it warrants patent protection.
The complexity of the process itself varies from country to country in Africa, which may explain why the percentage of global patent applications in Africa is so low. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) statistics show that in 2013 less than 1 per cent of Patent Cooperating Treaty (PCT) applications came from Africa. Underlying this are regulatory and procedural differences and weaknesses across the region. In some countries, antiquated laws mean that trademarks cannot be recognized; in others, applications still need to be made in person, with pieces of paper. It was only in 2014 that Nigeria started to migrate its application processes to a digital format.
Legal support is of course important and in Kenya, innovators benefit from an IP-friendly constitution. Chapter Two of Kenya’s constitution, ‘…promotes the intellectual property rights of the people of Kenya’, and pertinently to me aims to protect, ‘…and enhance intellectual property in, and indigenous knowledge of, biodiversity and the genetic resources of the communities.’ These small sentences in the nations constitution provide institutional support for innovators, which are set down in law. Sadly, for innovators in other nations, such legal support is simply not in existence.
The best route to securing intellectual property protection for innovators is legal protection, without which our region’s game-changers are vulnerable. Second to that however is education: entrepreneurs and innovators must be made aware of the importance of intellectual property protection and how to achieve it. Placing intellectual property on the agenda is important because it not only safeguards the innovators’ business interests, but ensures that the ideas they have deliver upon the social and economic promise they set out to achieve.
Many organizations in Africa, including non-profit and government bodies are working overtime to help people like me succeed. These include the Innovation Prize for Africa, which is a pan-African initiative that offers major cash prizes for those that come forward with genuinely ground-breaking innovations. It offers an annual 1st prize of $100,000, with second prizes of $25,000 – capital that is now seeing amazing innovations take root as successful businesses. This initiative, alongside others, provides much more than money – it provides business advisory services and a roadmap to success that includes guidance on how to achieve intellectual property protection. All innovators need to take advantage of such support if they are to realise their dreams and solve the intractable African problems that are on their doorstep.
