Intellectual Property Rights Law and Innovation in Uganda: The Need for a Coherent Policy Framework

Abstract

Innovation has been recognised as a major sourceof modern productivity and constitutes a centralprocess of economic development and in the case ofdeveloping countries, poverty reduction. However,Sub-Saharan Africa, and particular Uganda, has beenleft out in innovation because of the concentrationof its intellectual property legislation processes onthe transfers of technology that does not take thedeliberate and conscious effort in building indigenouscapacity in innovation and inventiveness. This paperentails a discussion an analysis of the factors shapingpatent law reforms in Uganda in the absence of anational system of innovation and thus exposes thedisjuncture of patent legislation with the nationalsystem of innovation. It is argued, herein, that forthe reforms to be more meaningful, there is need forharmonization of the two processes, lest the reformprocess will be irrelevant to Uganda and continueserving global north patent interests.As a colony of Britain, Uganda adopted herpatent law from England as part of the colonialheritage (Uganda was put under British influencefollowing the Anglo-German Agreement of 1800).A Royal Chartered company trading in the nameand style of Imperial British East African Company(IBEACO) was at the earliest tasked with trading aswell as administering the geographical extent thatcame to be known as Uganda. In 1894, Capt. FredrickLugard a colonial administrator was sent andformally declared Uganda a British Protectorate. Theinterest of the British was at the onset imperialist, tiedto economic exploitation. This economic imperialismarrested the autonomous development of Ugandaand divorced it into an integrated world commodityeconomy as Nabudere aptly puts it: