Designing Development-oriented Intellectual Property Technical Assistance Programmes

ICTSD-UNCTAD Dialogue, 2nd Bellagio Series on Development and Intellectual Property, 18-21 Sept. 03

by Sisule F. MUSUNGU, Project Officer South Centre

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Trade-related technical assistance including for intellectual property (IP) matters dates back in some form or the other to the early independence years of many developing and least-developed countries. However, with the coming into being of the World Trade Organization (WTO), multilateral agencies and bilateral donors significantly increased the resources for technical assistance and capacity building in the area of IP. These new resources aimed at the implementation of the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), were in addition to the resources that were already devoted to technical assistance activities under the auspices of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) and by developed countries to help in the implementation of WIPO and bilateral IP treaties. While this assistance, worth millions of dollars, has resulted in the improvement of developing countries’ IP policy-making and negotiating capacities, significant gaps, with serious development implications, still remain.

In particular, there is increasing concern that despite the increase in the number providers and in the resources devoted to technical assistance activities in IP; many developing and least-developed countries have not taken advantage of the development-friendly policy spaces within the TRIPS Agreement. At the same time, a number of these countries continue to engage in negotiations and/or are signing onto bilateral and multilateral agreements that further constrain these policy spaces. This has been interpreted to mean, in part, that various technical and capacity gaps which should have been filled still exist in these countries. In September 2002, the Commission on Intellectual Property Rights (IPR Commission) after reviewing the current IP related technical assistance programmes by WIPO and developed countries and assessing their impact, came to the conclusion that the results of the various activities under these programmes were not commensurate with the effort or the money so far spent. In particular, the Report concluded that the design and delivery of IP related technical assistance needed to be improved to ensure that it is much better integrated with overall national development strategy of the individual developing countries. The validity of this conclusion was examined and confirmed at the First Bellagio Series of dialogues in October/November 2003 during the session titled “Towards Development-Oriented Intellectual Property Policy: Setting the Agenda for the Next Five Years”.

This paper, which is a contribution for the session titled, “Towards a Development-Oriented IPR Agenda: TRIPS-plus, Technical Assistance and Technology Transfer” at the Second Bellagio Series, builds on these findings and conclusions. It outlines some thoughts on how to move forward the agenda for improving the design and delivery of technical assistance in the field of IP. It examines, in light of the above findings and conclusions, how development-friendly technical assistance -assistance to ensure that developing and least-developed countries tailor their IP policies and strategies to promote their development goals - should be designed and delivered. In particular, the paper examines, in turn, the following inter-related issues: (a) the current and future IP related technical and capacity gaps in developing and least-developed countries; (b) the limitations of the current IP related technical assistance programmes; (c) what needs to be taken into account in improving the designing and delivery of IP related technical assistance to make it development-friendly; and (d) possible indicators for evaluating the impact of IP technical assistance programmes.

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