ARIPO - AP
Jurisdiction - General Information
The African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO) is an inter-governmental organizationthat facilitates cooperation among its Member States on intellectual property matters, established bythe Lusaka Agreement on 9 December 1976.
The Harare Protocol empowers the ARIPO Office to receive and process patent and industrial design
applications on behalf of States party to the protocol. The Protocol entered into force in 1984.
The current members of ARIPO are: Botswana, Cape Verde, eSwatini, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho,Liberia, Malawi, Mauritius (not member of the Harare Protocol), Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Sào
Tomé and Príncipe, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia (not member of the Harare Protocol), Sudan,Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
With the exception of Somalia, all ARIPO members are also Contracting Parties to the PatentCooperation Treaty (PCT), however, eSwatini can be designated only via the ARIPO.
ARIPO itself can be designated under the PCT. It is also a member of the Paris Convention for theProtection of Industrial Property.
More legal information about intellectual property-related laws and regulations of ARIPO can be foundon WIPO Lex.

Online Patent Register and Online Gazette
ARIPO has an Online Register. It also has an Online Gazette (ARIPO JOURNAL).

Features and search functionalities
The online patent register has an English interface.
Through the patent register you can retrieve information on Legal Status.
The patent register can also be searched by PCT Application/Publication Number, byApplicant/Inventor Name, and by Priority Data.
The online gazette is searchable by number and downloadable in PDF format, which is publishedmonthly in English. The current coverage is from 2015 to present.

Additional Information
Particularities of patent protection given by ARIPO
The Harare Protocol empowers ARIPO to grant patents and register industrial designs as well as utility
models on behalf of the contracting states. The Protocol was first adopted in December 1982 and came

into force in April 1984. Currently, the Protocol is in force in all the Organization’s 22 member states
except Mauritius and Somalia. The Protocol was amended in 1993 to incorporate the PCT.
There is currently a second patent database including patents of ARIPO and of ARIPO’s members built on
the WIPO Publish platform available at this link, allowing a selection through a slider button between asearch limited to the most frequently used fields and a broader one enlarged to a wide number ofsearch fields, some of which however could be left empty.

Search tips
On the search page of the online register, you can choose between ARIPO and national IP rights, but thelatter is currently loading and a search gives no results.
PCT Application/Publication Number searches can be done using formats like, e.g., "PCT ApplicationNo." PCT/US99/09463
An example of data reported as a Legal Status is, e.g., "Withdrawal" for "Application Number"
AP/P/2000/001992
The Publication Server allows alternative searching of the ARIPO JOURNAL by Legal Status (e.g. patentapplication abandoned, filed, pending grant, patent granted, patent assigned).
Member States’ Journals (currently covering partially Kenya, Mozambique, Rwanda, Sào Tomé andPríncipe and Tanzania only) are available for download.