Algeria selected to host the Regional Office (Africa) of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) from January 2017.
It is Africa’s first office serving African countries, which for many years have advocated the opening of field offices in Africa as the only continent not to be represented on the external network of WIPO.
At the last WIPO General Assembly (August 2016) African Ambassadors Group in Geneva underlined that Africa did not have a WIPO representation on the continent, and called the PBC to recommend that Nigeria and Algeria be designated as two new WIPO external offices.
Six African countries (Algeria, Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria and Tunisia) were able to submit a nomination file in accordance with the conditions laid down by the United Nations.In the absence of consensus on the modalities for choosing two countries from among the six candidates, it was decided to vote by splitting the six countries into two distinct groups: North Africa (Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia), Sub- Saharan Africa (Kenya and Nigeria).
Following the vote held on 4th August 2016 in Geneva, Algeria was chosen, with a large majority, in the first round, to host the first external office.
Below the link to the Website of the National Office of Copyright and related Rights of Algeria:
