Photo by WIPO, 2022

World IP Day 2022

The World Intellectual Property (IP) Day held each year on 26 April is an opportunity to highlight the critical role that IP rights play in encouraging innovation. In 2022, the theme of World IP Day is IP and Youth: Innovating for a better future.

The youth of today are an incredible and largely untapped source of ingenuity and creativity that can help drive the changes we need to move to a more sustainable footing. For World IP Day 2022, IFPMA, WIPO, and key stakeholders are focusing on ‘Innovating for better health: Supporting Young Innovators Through IP’.

Intellectual property rights can enable young innovators to develop local health solutions for local health challenges.

Innovation plays a crucial role in addressing local challenges, and young innovators are changing this landscape with the power of their ideas and ambitions for the future, including the future of health. With adequate support and IP protection, young innovators can mobilize and provoke change, and help advance the fields of science, business, and innovation to improve health outcomes.

Yet, young innovators are without sufficient support to overcome key challenges in fulfilling the potential of their innovations – from concept and strategy to implementation and scale. These young entrepreneurs, especially young women and those in low- and middle-income countries, face financial barriers, as well as low visibility with investors and policymakers, limited understanding of IP and incentive systems, and lack of support from business mentors.

On World IP Day 2022, IFPMA, WIPO, and key stakeholders will host an event that highlights key elements of a sustainable health innovation ecosystem that can advance promising solutions designed by young innovators, illustrating the ways in which young people are not merely recipients of innovation, but co-creators of the future they will inherit. The high-level event and panel discussion will showcase outstanding young innovators in health, the challenges they face, and the enabling environment that supports them in their journeys to improve health outcomes and help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

Join our World IP Day event.

The Africa Young Innovators for Health Award is IFPMA and Speak Up Africa’s flagship program, focused on supporting pioneering young health entrepreneurs across Africa with financial and in-kind opportunities to develop their business ideas. And also advance promising solutions to support, equip, protect, and train healthcare workers who have been working tirelessly to protect and treat the public amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. The winners of the award are:

First prize – Conrad Tankou, CEO, GIC Space (Cameroon)
Second prize – John Mwangi, CEO, Daktari Media (Kenya)
Third prize – Imodoye Abioro, CEO, Healthbotics (Nigeria)

The Africa Young Innovators for Health Award launched the Women Innovators Incubator, an initiative aimed at addressing the gender imbalance that exists in Africa’s health innovation landscape. Participants of the 2022 Women Innovators Incubator are: