IP Protection in Africa: How to Protect Your Brand on Major African Online Marketplaces

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overview

In a world filled with counterfeit goods, Africa is no exception. The African continent’s large and growing population and the increasing buying power of the middle class give rise to opportunities for counterfeiters. While most commerce still takes place offline, there are also several significant online marketplaces. In this article, we explore the existing notice and takedown mechanisms on the 12 main African e-commerce platforms to help you adjust your online marketplace brand protection strategy to achieve greater IP protection in Africa.

Given the immense size and diversity of the continent, any examination of African e-commerce platforms requires a limitation in scope. To that end, it is pertinent to focus on the countries and regions with the most economic activity and the highest levels of internet adoption. At the time of writing, the five biggest economies in Africa are Nigeria, the largest both by nominal and digital gross domestic product (GDP), followed by South Africa, Egypt, Algeria, and Kenya. In these countries, 12 online marketplaces dominate e-commerce. In the table below, we have gathered the biggest actors, their markets, operation models, infringement reporting mechanisms, and Alexa ranking.

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Measured by revenue, the biggest online marketplace in Africa is Jumia.com, which was founded in Nigeria in 2012 and is currently operating in three of the five countries examined. The runner-up is Kilimall, currently operating in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria. Kilimall was founded in 2014 as a direct competitor to Jumia.

The complete absence of any reporting mechanism in half of the investigated platforms demonstrates that IP enforcement presents a real challenge—and it also comes as a surprise as most of the platforms are backed or even founded by experienced internet giants from the northern hemisphere such as Rocket Internet (invested in Jumia), OLX (founded in Russia), and Amazon (acquired Souq). Those companies have been well-exposed to the issue of counterfeits on their own platforms, yet it appears that the topic did not make it on the high-priority list of their ventures on the African continent.

How to Achieve Online Marketplace Brand Protection in Africa

Whatever the cause for the lack of IP protection mechanisms for these online marketplaces in Africa, it is probably not the lack of supporting regulations. All of the countries concerned by our investigation are members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and, notably, parties to the TRIPS Agreement as well as the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property. Kenya, for example, passed an Act against counterfeiting in 2008, declared the Act to be part of the constitution in 2010, and established an Anti-Counterfeit Agency for Kenya. Still, as in all other parts of the world, policing of IP rights continues to lie chiefly in the hands of the rightsholder.

Unfortunately, when it comes to IP protection in Africa on online marketplaces, only a handful of the leading African platforms provide mechanisms for enforcing IP rights and these might even prove to be impractical. For example, Jumia Nigeria claims to have an enforcement mechanism available to rightsholders. However, the platform only accepts complaints made by regular mail. The second platform investigated, Kilimall, does not provide a complaint mechanism at all, which makes the position of IP owners challenging at the very least.

While even the largest players in the African e-commerce market are still relatively small, the ongoing digitization of trade warrants right holders to start monitoring these platforms today. Only then will the online marketplaces of tomorrow have appropriate IP protection and online marketplace brand protection mechanisms in place.

Given up to 85% of consumer goods sold offline in Africa are estimated to be counterfeit, it is vital to start now to avoid these statistics from being replicated in the growing e-commerce sphere.

Thomsen Trampedach, our center of excellence for online brand protection, helps clients achieve IP protection in Africa through our comprehensive online marketplace brand protection platform. We offer the full spectrum of trademark enforcement measures across online marketplaces in Africa and worldwide and take down infringing content across websites, social media, domain names, and more [1]. For further information and support, contact our team.

[1] Questel does not provide any legal services. Legal services are provided by independent IP attorneys on the basis of a separate engagement agreement between you and, if you wish to, a partner IP attorney firm.