A World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) delegation headed by Mr. Andrew Michael Ong, Director of Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific visited the ECO Secretariat on September 12, 2023 for a meeting with the ECO Agriculture and Industry Directorate.
During the bilateral interaction, the WIPO dignitary briefed the ECO officials on their role and activities to promote and protect intellectual property all over the globe in cooperation with governments and international organizations. Reviewing the existing level of WIPO-ECO relations, Mr. Ong looked forward to scaling up the cooperative engagements between the two Organizations, focusing on the implementation of WIPO-ECO MoU that was signed in 2018.
The ECO Director for Agriculture and Industry, Mr. Gürkan Polat acknowledged that increased partnership between the ECO and WIPO would facilitate an early accomplishment of their mutually desired outcomes within the supportive scope of ECO-WIPO MoU. To this end, he emphasized for accelerating their technical and administrative cooperation, including in capacity building, legislative & policy consultations, as well as development of IP infrastructures. IP training courses and workshops for SMEs of the member countries are also necessarily required, he noted.
Both sides reciprocated their equally expressed ambition to strengthen the ECO-WIPO collaboration, through some joint initiatives, programs and events.
