The current status of rights protection mechanisms of 12 major e-commerce platforms in Africa

Currently, the five largest economies in Africa are Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, Algeria and Kenya. In these five countries, there are 12 e-commerce online platforms, namely:

In terms of revenue, the largest online market in Africa is Jumia.com, which was founded in Nigeria in 2012 and currently operates in Egypt, Kenya and Nigeria. The second largest online market is Kilimall, which was founded in 2014 and is a direct competitor of Jumia. The actual creators of these African platforms are Internet giants in the northern hemisphere, including Rocket Internet, an Internet company headquartered in Berlin, Germany, which is focused on incubating, building and strategically investing in Internet and technology companies and has invested in Jumia, while OLX is headquartered in Amsterdam and Souq was acquired by Amazon for $650 million.

However, the current intellectual property protection mechanism in Africa is far from a mature working mechanism, and most platforms do not have a mature complaint mechanism, which makes it extremely difficult for intellectual property owners on the platform to protect their rights. According to statistics, up to 85% of the goods sold offline in Africa are counterfeit.