In March 1977 the Bangui Agreement (hereinafter, also referred
to as "Agreement") created OAPI, the Organisation
Africaine de la Propriété Intellectuelle (African
Organization of Intellectual Property). OAPI is an organization
mainly composed of francophone jurisdictions, namely: Benin,
Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the
Comoro Islands, Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea,
Gabon, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, and
Togo. The main purpose of its creation was to encourage member
states to collaborate, build networks and share common resources.
The benefit of filing through the regional system is the
possibility of obtaining protection for Industrial Property assets
in several countries at the same time, through a single and uniform
filing procedure which, of course, reduces the overall costs of
said procedure and the time frame to obtain protection. In the
Bangui Agreement preamble, it is stated «(...)
