IP and capacity-building: either/or or both/and?

"Formal IP System Does Not Fit Africa, LDCs Need Technological Capacity, Speakers Say", by Catherine Saez, was posted on Intellectual Property Watch last week. You can read it here.

This article summarises discussions by a panel addressing the relationship between intellectual property and innovation in Africa, in particular in the informal sector, which took place on the final day of the World Trade Organization Public Forum on 1 to 3 October.

Readers are invited to form their own opinions, in the unlikely event that they do not have their own already.  This blogger's position is that it's not an either-or issue. Africa needs both a formal IP system and more technology capacity-building because each enriches the other.  This blogger is also concerned at the ease with which Africa is at one moment treated as though it were a single homogenous and generally rather hopeless country and then, minutes later, described in terms of the vast diversity which makes it so impossible to generalise across its culturally, economically and politically separate regions.

Comments, anyone?