The Focus, activities and Outcomes of Project: This project aims to investigate how countries can adopt regional strategies to resolve the tension between intellectual property (IP) regimes and access to medicine, by examining the extent to which the use of public interest exceptions in international intellectual property law may facilitate access to medicine.

The project will address this aim through the following objectives:
1. Investigate the global state of the trade-off between intellectual property and access to medicine and undertake a review of the legal measures that may be adopted to address challenges associated with IP and access to medicines in Africa.
2. Evaluate strategies that may be used for implementing IP exemptions that promote access to medicines in African Union States.
3. Evaluate the legal implications of using regional strategies to foster the use of IP exemptions especially in relation to voluntary and non-voluntary licensing and parallel importation.

The United Nations (UN) Secretary General in 2015 formed a High-Level Panel on Innovation and Access to Health Technologies with a mandate to propose ways of incentivising innovation in health technologies and increasing access to medicine and treatment. The panel in its report released in September 2016 recommended that WTO members should be fully committed to respecting ‘the letter and spirit of the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health’ while refraining from actions that are likely to undermine the use of TRIPS flexibilities.

While commentaries have been written on intellectual property and access to medicine, limited consideration has been given to supra-national regions, such as Africa and access to medicines. Most significantly, research overlooks the ways developing countries may effectively use the existing IP public interest exceptions in the TRIPS Agreement through a regional framework.

The UN adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015 with goal 3 relating to ensuring healthy lives and promoting ‘wellbeing for all at all ages’. The WHO, UNAIDS and the UN are all firmly committed to ending pandemics such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria while reducing the incidence of other communicable diseases by 2030. The project outcomes will produce knowledge that can inform the adoption of a regional strategy to maximise the use of the existing TRIPS flexibilities in the African continent. This is expected to contribute to alleviating the burden of disease in vulnerable communities in the continent.