Research Associate

HALM, Naana E. K., Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg

Mrs. Halm, a Ghanaian national, is a legal researcher, business law lecturer and an intellectual property consultant. She has consulted on projects including a WTO capacity building project to enhance the competitiveness of the Ghanaian pharmaceutical industry in conformity with the TRIPS Agreement. She has also made recommendations for improvements to the Ghana Patent Law to facilitate better and more accessible means for the local pharmaceutical industry to compete in a global environment. Mrs. Halm is currently working with the Witwatersrand University as one of Ghana’s three country research consultants on the African Copyright Access to Knowledge (ACA2K) project.

Mrs. Halm holds a Masters of Law degree (LL.M) in Intellectual Property Law, and a Bachelor of Law from the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. She is a scholarship holder from the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law. The topic of her Masters thesis was ‘Traditional Medicine and Intellectual Property - Seeking to bridge the Gap’. She has published articles including Should developing countries ‘copy’ to catch up with the developed world?, available at www.ip-watch.org/weblog/index.php?p=406.

Mrs. Halm is particularly interested in studying how international intellectual property policies have an effect on developing countries and how the ignorance gap can be closed, so that developing countries can use intellectual property rights as development tools. Other research areas of interest include access to knowledge, traditional medicine and sustainable development through I.P. awareness and protection.