Patents and Utility Models in Tanzania: What Can Be Protected

This page is the industrial property operating file: what Cap. 217 accepts, which of its two forms an invention takes, and where the rest belongs. It is not a drafting manual.

• The first ninety days: launch compliance plan
• What a registered name does not buy: your company name is not a trade mark
• Where R&D spend is recorded: books that support returns
• Ground under the plant: land due diligence

As at 14 September 2026. Confirm forms, fees and the register at brela.go.tz; this file rests on Cap. 217, the Harare Protocol, the Patent Cooperation Treaty and, for Unguja and Pemba, the island Act BPRA administers.

Two registers: Cap. 217 at BRELA, the island Act at BPRA

Mainland Tanzania runs on Cap. 217, the Patents (Registration) Act, administered by the Registrar of Patents inside the Business Registrations and Licensing Agency: a different officer from the one keeping the companies register and the marks register under the Trade and Service Marks Act, Cap. 326.

Nothing in that statute reaches Unguja or Pemba. The islands sit under the Zanzibar Industrial Property Act, 2008, administered by the Business and Property Registration Agency. A Mainland grant waved at an island copier fails on the advocate's first question. Selling across the channel costs a second application, a second agent and a second renewal diary.

Who may file, who owns it, and who signs

A patent here may be owned by a foreign person or company; proprietorship is not a reserved activity. What a non-resident may not do is file in his own hand. He acts through an agent on the Registrar's list, gives an address for service here, and signs a power of attorney notarised abroad and legalised for use here.

Holding the grant and working the invention are separate questions. Where the plan is to manufacture and sell here, the channel is tested against the reserved-activity list at GN No. 487A of 2025, which covers wholesale and retail distribution: hence a foreign proprietor on the register and a local licensee in the trade.

An invention made by an employee in execution of his duties belongs to the employer unless the contract says otherwise, and Cap. 217 preserves his claim to equitable remuneration where the economic result far exceeds what either side contemplated. A consultant's work stays his until a deed of assignment moves it, executed before the application names an applicant.

What counts as an invention, and what Cap. 217 leaves out

Three tests, together. Novelty is absolute: anything disclosed to the public anywhere in the world, in print, in speech or by use before the filing or priority date defeats the application, with no exception for a demonstration to a buyer who signed nothing. Inventive step asks whether the advance would have been obvious to a person skilled in the art. Industrial application asks whether the thing can be manufactured or applied in an industry, agriculture included.

Outside the definition altogether: discoveries, scientific theories and mathematical methods; schemes for doing business, for purely mental acts and for games; methods of treating the human or animal body by surgery or therapy, and diagnostic methods practised on it, though a product used in such a method is not excluded; plant and animal varieties and essentially biological processes for producing them; and anything whose exploitation would offend public order or morality.

Each exclusion has a home elsewhere. A new maize variety goes to the registrar under the Plant Breeders' Rights Act, 2012. Source code and manuals are literary works deposited with COSOTA under the Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Act, Cap. 218. A name or logo is a Cap. 326 filing. A blend kept behind a door is better a trade secret, since a patent publishes the specification.

Patent or utility certificate

The second form exists for the incremental, mechanical improvement that would not survive an obviousness argument.

Conversion is live, not theoretical: an application meeting resistance on inventive step can be turned into the other form instead of abandoned, if the request reaches the Registrar before he disposes of it.

Three ways in: BRELA, ARIPO and the PCT

A direct filing at BRELA is the shortest route and the only one producing a Tanzanian grant with no foreign office in the chain. Tanzania is party to the Harare Protocol, so an application at the African Regional Intellectual Property Organisation designating Tanzania takes effect on the Mainland unless BRELA refuses within six months of notification.

An international application under the Patent Cooperation Treaty arrives either by national phase at BRELA or by regional phase at ARIPO with Tanzania designated. Do not paste in the thirty or thirty-one months printed on a foreign checklist: read the current TZ chapter of the PCT Applicant's Guide, because the limit at this designated Office has not always matched it.

No route reaches the islands. Zanzibar stays a separate filing at BPRA whichever door was used.

The sequence

1. Search before you spend: PATENTSCOPE at WIPO, the ARIPO register and BRELA's entries; the cheapest refusal is the one you find yourself.
2. Fix the date: file before any demonstration, tender, trade-fair stand or investor pack leaves the office.
3. Choose the form: a patent where the claims carry an inventive step, a utility certificate where the advance is incremental.
4. Answer the Registrar: clear formal objections and furnish, where asked, the search or examination report from any corresponding foreign application.
5. Take the grant: the right is entered and advertised, and the certificate names the proprietor exactly as the applicant was named.
6. Diarise annual fees and the extension: the first falls due in the application's second year, alongside the working evidence the extension will need.
7. Licence or assign in writing: and record the dealing, because an unrecorded one is the gap diligence finds.

The papers the file needs

• Request naming the applicant and every inventor, who has a right to be named
• Specification: description, claims, abstract, and drawings wherever the claims refer to them
• Priority document certified by the office of first filing, translated if not in English
• Deed of assignment from inventor to applicant, executed before the application goes in
• Power of attorney to the agent, notarised and legalised, carrying the address for service
• Certificate of incorporation or a BRELA extract and TIN for a Tanzanian applicant
• Statement of entitlement where the invention was made by an employee
• Proof of the filing fee against BRELA's schedule, which prices residents and non-residents separately

Illustrative arithmetic, not a quotation

A Mwanza workshop improves the drum of a cassava grater: real, mechanical, and the kind a rival reaches in a week. Volume is 900 units a year at a trade price of TZS 480,000 against a cost of TZS 330,000: TZS 150,000 a unit, TZS 135,000,000 of protected margin each year.

• Utility certificate: seven years of exclusivity, 7 × TZS 135,000,000 = TZS 945,000,000, with no obviousness argument left to lose.
• Patent, if the claims hold: 10 × TZS 135,000,000 = TZS 1,350,000,000 before any extension, and TZS 2,700,000,000 across the full twenty.
• Patent refused after two years of prosecution: nothing, and a published specification every competitor may now read.

The drum is a utility-certificate file. A new enzyme in the same plant is not, and the same sum over a twenty-year product life answers the other way. Official fees sit on BRELA's schedule.

Annual fees, working, and the licence you can be forced to give

A granted right is kept alive by annual fees paid in advance from the second year of the application onward. Miss one and the Act allows a short grace against a surcharge; after it the right lapses, the invention falls into the public domain, and anyone may build it.

Extension beyond the first decade is not automatic. The request must satisfy the Registrar that the invention is being worked in Tanzania, or explain on reasons he accepts why it is not. Import volumes, a signed licence, a production line, purchase orders: an evidence file built across ten years.

Non-working also invites a non-voluntary licence. Tanzania is a Paris Convention member and the Convention sets the floor: no compulsory licence for failure to work before four years from the filing date or three years from the grant, whichever expires last. Confirm how Cap. 217 frames such an application, and who hears it.

Where the file stalls

• Shown at a trade fair or put in a tender before anything was filed: novelty gone, and no desk repairs it.
• Claims drafted to describe the product instead of defining the monopoly, so a rival alters one dimension and walks around them.
• An employee-inventor named as applicant, or a contractor's assignment signed after filing, leaving a title defect that surfaces in diligence.
• A Mainland grant relied on in Stone Town, discovered when the advocate asks for the BPRA certificate.
• Annual fees left with a former agent whose engagement quietly ended, reminders going to an address nobody reads.
• A PCT entry diarised at thirty months from a template written for another country.

Mandate-holders this file does not replace

BRELA's Registrar grants, keeps the register and publishes. He does not decide infringement, and he is not where a granted right is undone: invalidation is a suit in the High Court. ARIPO prosecutes on the regional route and enforces nothing. COSOTA owns copyright in code and drawings; the Registrar of Trade and Service Marks owns the brand; the plant breeders' registrar owns varieties; the Fair Competition Commission owns fake goods at the border under the Merchandise Marks Act, Cap. 85; TMDA, TBS and the sector regulators decide whether a product may be sold at all, which no grant has ever answered. Zatra prepares the pack, sequences those desks and coordinates the agent, the assignment and the licence; it does not practise law, argue an application before the Registrar, or promise a grant.

What to confirm before you act

• Whether the invention has been shown, sold, published or tendered, and on what date
• Which form the claims can carry, settled with the agent before money moves
• Live filing, annual and extension fees on brela.go.tz, resident and non-resident lines apart
• The length of the disclosure window Cap. 217 allows, put to the Registrar in writing
• Whether Unguja or Pemba is a market, and if so the BPRA application alongside it
• The national-phase time limit for TZ in the current PCT Applicant's Guide
• That every assignment and licence is executed, stamped where stamp duty applies, and recorded