The African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO), the body that administers patent and trademark protection for more than twenty African states, is headquartered in Harare. The continent’s IP infrastructure sits ten minutes from your office. Yet most Zimbabwean businesses have never registered a single right with it, or anywhere else.
Which raises an uncomfortable question for every business owner: if your brand, your recipe, your software or your seed variety walked out the door tomorrow, could you stop anyone from using it? For most, the honest answer is no. Not because the law offers no protection, but because nobody ever asked for it.
That gap between what our businesses create and what they actually own is the defining intellectual property story of 2026. And this year, of all years, is the moment to close it.
Why 2026 is different
Intellectual property has moved from the footnotes of Zimbabwean policy to the main text. In December 2025, the Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) visited Harare and met the President, with discussions centred on using IP to drive the new National Development Strategy running from 2026 to 2030, alongside innovation hubs, local product promotion and support for SMEs and creators. Government is reviewing the National Intellectual Property Policy with WIPO’s support, and Zimbabwe recently hosted the WIPO Worldwide Symposium on Geographical Indications in Victoria Falls.
In other words, the policy momentum, the international attention and the regional machinery are all converging on Harare at once. And there is an additional pressure: the government has begun implementing a value-addition strategy with immediate effect in minerals, and all signals are pointing to expansion across other industries. The underlying logic is unambiguous: businesses cannot export raw or unfinished goods. They must build value chains and finished products domestically, then take those finished goods to market globally. That transition is not just a business strategy. It is the only strategy left for businesses that intend to scale. And it demands IP protection at every step: for formulations, processes, branding and market positioning. The businesses that will scale out of Zimbabwe in the next five years will do so on the back of protected intellectual property, not raw commodity extraction. The question is whether Zimbabwean businesses will own those assets, or watch competitors own them.
The pressing issues
1. The registration gap. Zimbabwe’s framework is more complete than most assume. Trademarks are protected under the Trade Marks Act (Chapter 26:04), patents under the Patents Act (Chapter 26:03), copyright under the Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Act (Chapter 26:05), with industrial designs, geographical indications and plant breeders’ rights covered by their own statutes. Zimbabwe is a member of WIPO, ARIPO, the Madrid System for international trademarks and the Patent Cooperation Treaty. The law is not the problem. Usage is. Most local brands trade on goodwill alone, which is a polite way of saying they trade on hope, but as the saying goes, “hope is not a strategy”. IP rights are territorial: a trademark registered nowhere is enforceable nowhere, and a brand that succeeds in Harare can be registered in Johannesburg or Lusaka by someone faster than you.
2. Innovation without ownership. Our universities and innovation hubs are producing prototypes, research outputs and start-ups at a pace Education 5.0 was designed to achieve. Very little of it is patented, licensed or assigned properly. An invention disclosed at a conference or exhibition before filing can lose patentability entirely. Zimbabwe is generating intellectual property and giving it away at the door.
3. Agriculture’s quiet IP revolution. New crop varieties, indigenous products, distinctive regional goods: these are protectable assets. Plant breeders’ rights reward those who develop new cultivars, and geographical indications can do for Zimbabwean products what Champagne did for a French region. The Victoria Falls symposium was a signal. The producers who move first will own categories, not just products.
4. The digital and artificial intelligence (AI) question. Zimbabwean creators are publishing music, film and content onto global platforms daily, often with no registered rights, no licensing strategy and no idea who owns what when a collaboration sours. Layer on artificial intelligence, which can now generate logos, text and designs, and the ownership questions multiply. Who owns AI-assisted work? Can you build a brand on it? These are no longer academic questions. They are contract clauses waiting to be written or litigated.
5. Scaling finished goods, not raw materials. In February 2026, the government banned exports of all raw minerals and lithium concentrates with immediate effect. The policy signals a broader shift toward value-addition across industries: finished goods, not raw commodities, are the future of Zimbabwean exports. That transition is not optional. The ban applies even to cargoes already in transit. Whether a company is processing mineral ore, transforming agricultural products into branded goods, or manufacturing finished products for export, the economic logic is identical. A Zimbabwean value-added product competing in Johannesburg, London or Toronto lives or dies on its IP protection: trademarks, patents on processes, geographical indications that prove origin, trade secrets that protect competitive advantage. A mining company that builds a refined product, a food manufacturer that develops a distinctive processed good, a tech company that builds software. All must own what they create or watch competitors own it for them. This is where Zimbabwe’s next scaling wave will happen, across all sectors. And it requires international IP registration from day one, not as an afterthought.
6. IP as a balance sheet asset. Here is the thought worth sitting with: globally, intangible assets now dominate the value of leading companies. In Zimbabwe, most businesses carry their most valuable assets entirely off the books. Registered IP can be valued, licensed, franchised, used as security and sold. Unregistered IP can only be lost. If you are preparing for investment, listing or succession, an empty IP register is a discount on your valuation that you imposed on yourself.
What to do about it, practically
Start with three questions. What have we created? What of it is registered, and where? What is contractually secured with employees, contractors and partners? If any answer is unclear, you have work to do before a competitor, an investor or a former employee does it for you.
At I.V. Pasi Law, we help clients turn ideas into assets. Our services include include, but are not limited to:
-IP audits that map what your business owns and what it has left exposed;
-trademark, patent and design registration in Zimbabwe, through ARIPO and internationally via the Madrid System and PCT;
-drafting of licensing, franchising, assignment and confidentiality agreements;
-drafting of IP provisions in employment and contractor agreements;
-commercialization and IP-backed transaction structuring; and
-enforcement against infringement and counterfeiting.
The National Development Strategy has put innovation at the centre of Zimbabwe’s next five years. The government’s value-addition policy (starting with raw materials, expanding across industries) is reshaping which businesses scale and which stall. The ones that scale will do so on protected intellectual property. The businesses that will benefit are those that own what they build.