The government, through Uganda Registration Service Bureau (URSB), has launched a new Intellectual Property (IP) program in schools to help learners protect and commercialise their ideas and innovations. The program, launched in partnership with World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), aims to position IP as a key driver of national development.
“At the highest level of policy-making, we want to help and support you [Uganda] to refine your national IP policy and position it as a horizontal tool so that it’s not just the job for Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Affairs, or URSB but it now becomes the collective responsibility and the catalyst for the work across all different ministries,” said WIPO Director General, Daren Tang.
The program marks a shift in how Uganda prepares its young population for the future driven by innovation and creativity. URSB Registrar General, Mercy Kainobwisho, emphasised that IP education has been limited in Uganda, mostly taught as an optional subject in law schools.
“We have decided to capture young people when they are still young, the fact that the government had a shift in the education curriculum, where it is now more practical than theoretical,” Kainobwisho said. She added that many learners in secondary schools are already creating innovations that require protection.
The initiative aims to empower young people to understand IP and address unemployment. “We need to engage them and interest them, and make it practical for them, or make it easy for them to appreciate that they can create value, or co-create value through protection of intellectual property,” Kainobwisho said.
URSB plans to set up an innovation hub to coordinate IP data and support young innovators, alongside strengthening partnerships with universities and other stakeholders.
“We have quite a number of hubs in the country, but we are not coordinated. But we want to have this one, which will be a central base here and set forth any data on intellectual property,” said URSB Board Chair, Francis Butagira.
Butagira emphasized the importance of geographical indications and the need for an audit to identify products Uganda can protect and commercialize globally. He urged financial institutions to recognize IP as an asset that can be used as collateral, describing it as a modern way of doing things that Uganda must embrace.
“You know that intellectual property now is an asset. It can be mortgaged. You can use it as a collateral but in Uganda we have not exploited it well, so we need to engage a lot of stakeholders, like banks, on the importance of IP as a collateral,” Butagira said.