A fashion brand that has successfully registered its trademark in Nigeria, and assumes that protection now extends meaningfully across the continent, has misunderstood something fundamental about how African intellectual property law actually works. Trademark protection is territorial. It does not travel automatically with a brand’s growing reputation, and it does not travel automatically with a continental trade agreement either. What Africa offers instead, for a brand willing to understand the architecture, are two regional systems, the African Intellectual Property Organisation, known by its French acronym OAPI, and the African Regional Intellectual Property Organisation, ARIPO, each of which allows a single application to reach multiple countries at once. They are not the same system in different languages. They work on fundamentally different legal logic, and a brand that treats them as interchangeable is likely to discover the difference at exactly the wrong moment, when a mark is challenged or an infringer is operating in a country the brand assumed was covered.
Two Systems, Built on Different Legal Foundations
OAPI: one application, one outcome, no alternative. The Organisation Africaine de la Propriété Intellectuelle was established by the Bangui Agreement in 1977, significantly revised in 1999, and is based in Yaoundé, Cameroon. It has 17 member states, concentrated in French-speaking West and Central Africa: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Comoros, the Republic of Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, and Togo.
The defining feature of OAPI is that it is genuinely unitary. A single application, filed once, in one language, automatically covers all 17 member states, with no need for country-by-country designation or subsequent national formalities. Member states do not maintain separate national trademark registries at all, there is no option to file nationally in an OAPI country instead of, or alongside, the regional system. The Bangui Agreement functions as the region’s entire trademark code. This means the outcome is genuinely singular too: OAPI conducts its own examination, and a mark that is granted is granted across the whole territory at once, not selectively approved in some member states and refused in others.
ARIPO: designation, coexistence, and a bundle of national rights. The African Regional Intellectual Property Organisation was established under the Lusaka Agreement in 1976 as a broader cooperation framework, with trademark protection specifically governed by a separate instrument adopted later, the Banjul Protocol on Marks, adopted in 1993. This distinction matters procedurally: ARIPO itself has a wider membership than the Banjul Protocol does, member states can choose which of ARIPO’s various protocols to ratify, and only a subset of ARIPO’s members have actually joined the Banjul Protocol and are therefore available for trademark designation. As of recent years, the Banjul Protocol’s trademark-eligible states include Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, São Tomé and Príncipe, Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and the Gambia, a list that has grown steadily and should always be checked for currency before filing, since new states continue to accede.
ARIPO’s mechanism is structurally different from OAPI’s in a way that genuinely changes how a brand should think about filing strategy. An ARIPO application does not automatically cover every member state, the applicant specifically designates which Banjul Protocol states they want protection in. Once granted, the result is not a single unitary right but what practitioners describe as a “bundle of national rights”, the registration has the same legal effect as if the brand had filed separately and directly in each designated country, and it must be enforced according to each country’s own national law. Critically, ARIPO coexists with national trademark offices rather than replacing them, a brand can still file nationally in an ARIPO member state instead of, or in addition to, going through the regional system. And because examination is substantially decentralised, each designated state may conduct its own substantive review, it is genuinely possible for a mark to be refused in one designated country while proceeding to registration in the others, an outcome that simply cannot happen under OAPI’s unitary model.
What This Actually Means for a Brand Deciding Where and How to File
If you are expanding into Francophone West or Central Africa, OAPI is not optional, it is the only route. Because OAPI member states have no independent national trademark registries, there is no alternative path to registered trademark protection in, for example, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, or Cameroon, other than filing through OAPI itself. A brand that skips this step because it feels bureaucratic, or because it assumes reputation alone offers protection, has no registered fallback option in that market at all.
If you are expanding into ARIPO’s Banjul Protocol states, you have a genuine choice to make, and it should be a deliberate one. A brand entering, say, Zimbabwe or Malawi can file nationally, file through ARIPO designating that country specifically, or, if it anticipates wider regional expansion, designate several Banjul Protocol states in a single ARIPO application to manage cost and administrative burden. The right choice depends on how confident the brand is about its expansion plans at the time of filing, and how much it values centralised administration, since converting strategy later, after an initial narrow filing, is possible but adds cost and time that a broader designation at the outset would have avoided.
Enforcement strategy differs fundamentally between the two systems. Because OAPI operates under a single regional code, disputes and enforcement questions are, in principle, governed by a common legal framework across the whole territory. Because ARIPO’s registrations are a bundle of national rights, enforcement against an infringer in, say, Tanzania has to proceed under Tanzanian law specifically, using Tanzanian enforcement mechanisms, even though the underlying registration originated through a single ARIPO filing. A brand planning its anti-counterfeiting or enforcement strategy across ARIPO territory needs to understand it is not managing one legal relationship, it is managing several, connected by a shared filing history but governed separately.
Nigeria itself sits outside both systems entirely, and this is worth stating plainly because it surprises many Nigerian brand owners. Nigeria is neither an OAPI member nor a Banjul Protocol signatory. A Nigerian fashion brand’s registration with the Nigerian Trademarks Registry protects the mark within Nigeria and nowhere else, it does not extend into OAPI territory, ARIPO territory, or any other African jurisdiction automatically. A Nigerian brand expanding into Senegal needs an OAPI filing. The same brand expanding into Kenya, which is an ARIPO member but should be checked for its specific Banjul Protocol status alongside its national trademark office option, needs a separate decision entirely. Continental economic integration under the African Continental Free Trade Area does not change this picture, AfCFTA addresses tariffs and trade in goods, not the territorial scope of intellectual property registration, a distinction fashion brands building pan-African expansion plans need to hold clearly in mind rather than assume one framework covers what the other does not.
Why This Fragmentation Exists, and What It Means for African Fashion Law
The existence of two separate regional IP systems across the continent, rather than one, is itself a product of Africa’s colonial and post-colonial legal history, OAPI’s francophone civil law heritage and ARIPO’s anglophone and lusophone common law orientation reflect the administrative and legal traditions inherited from different colonial powers, subsequently formalised into two distinct treaty frameworks rather than harmonised into one. This is not a criticism of either system, both have succeeded, within their own logic, in giving brand owners meaningfully simplified access to multi-country protection compared to filing separately in every jurisdiction by hand. But it is a structural reality that a genuinely pan-African fashion brand, one actually trying to build protection across both French-speaking and English-speaking Africa simultaneously, has to navigate as two entirely separate exercises, not one continental filing.
This is precisely the kind of fragmentation a pan-African fashion law institution should be naming clearly and helping brands, and policymakers, understand, not because the fragmentation is likely to disappear soon, meaningful convergence between OAPI and ARIPO has been discussed for years without resolution, but because a brand that understands the architecture can plan around it deliberately, budgeting for two separate filing strategies from the outset rather than discovering the gap only once an infringer is already operating in a market the brand assumed, incorrectly, was already covered.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I register my trademark in Nigeria and have it automatically protected in Senegal or Cameroon? No. Nigeria is not an OAPI member, and OAPI member states have no national trademark registration alternative. Protection in OAPI territory requires a separate OAPI filing regardless of where else the brand is already registered.
If I file through ARIPO, does that cover every ARIPO member country? No. ARIPO’s trademark mechanism, the Banjul Protocol, has its own, smaller list of participating states within ARIPO’s broader membership, and even within that list, the applicant must specifically designate which states they want covered, coverage is not automatic across every ARIPO member.
Can a trademark be refused in one country but still registered in others under the same filing? Under ARIPO, yes, because each designated state can conduct its own examination and the resulting rights are a bundle of separate national rights. Under OAPI, no, the system produces a single unitary outcome across all member states at once.
Is it better to file nationally or through ARIPO in a Banjul Protocol country? This depends on the brand’s actual expansion plans and risk tolerance. A single-country filing may be simpler and cheaper for one market alone, while an ARIPO filing designating several Banjul Protocol states can be more efficient for a brand with genuine multi-country ambitions in that region, provided the brand understands enforcement will still proceed under each country’s own national law.
Closing
A pan-African fashion brand’s trademark strategy cannot be a single decision, it has to be at least two decisions, shaped by the different legal architecture of OAPI and ARIPO, and a third consideration entirely for any country, like Nigeria, that sits outside both systems. Understanding this early, before expansion rather than after a dispute, is the difference between a brand that actually holds enforceable rights across the markets it operates in and one that has assumed protection it never actually secured.
Fashion Law Institute Africa engages with the legal frameworks shaping intellectual property protection for African fashion brands across the continent’s regional and national systems. If you are building a pan-African brand and thinking through where your protection actually needs to be secured, we would welcome the conversation.
