Introduction

In late September 2025, Ghana reached an important cultural and legal milestone, where the government, working with the Registrar-General’s Department and with technical assistance from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), officially registered Kente cloth as the country’s first Geographical Indication (GI).¹ The launch, held at La-Palm Royal Beach Hotel in Accra, ties the name Kente to a defined set of places and practices; that is, weaving communities such as Bonwire, Adanwomase, Agotime-Kpetoe, Agbozume, and Tafi Atome,² and creates legal rules about who may market cloth as “Kente.” This move both symbolizes and offers a legal recognition that the cloth’s reputation, techniques and cultural meaning are rooted in particular places and communities, and therefore deserves protection and management.

What is a Geographical Indication?

As has been previously discussed in CIPIT’s blogs, a Geographical Indication is an intellectual property right that links a product to a place and to qualities, reputation, or characteristics essentially attributable to that place.³ The TRIPS Agreement⁴ and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) describe GIs as signs that indicate origin and certify that the product’s special characteristics flow from its geographical origin or traditional know-how.⁵ Typical GI regimes require a clearly defined product, a delimited geographical area, and a specification (often called a product brief) that describes the production methods, the qualities or reputation to be protected, and the link between those qualities and the place.⁶ National procedures then examine whether the application meets statutory tests and whether it would mislead consumers or conflict with prior rights.⁷

Practical steps, common across many jurisdictions and WIPO technical assistance projects, include: documenting the product’s history and link to a given place; defining the production zone and who may use the name (individual artisans, cooperatives, or community trusts); preparing a specification that sets quality and production standards; and filing with the national GI registry or the competent intellectual property office.⁸ WIPO often provides capacity-building, model specifications, and workshops to support communities and national offices during this process.⁹

To note, Kenya, as in several other jurisdictions, often rely on trademark law, particularly certification marks, to secure protection for place-based products.¹⁰ Kenya’s Trade Marks Act allows certification marks to serve as a practical substitute for GIs by enabling producer groups, cooperatives, and public bodies to set and enforce standards tied to quality, origin, and production methods.¹¹ Similar approaches are found in countries such as the United States,¹² Australia,¹³ and South Africa,¹⁴ where certification and collective marks function as flexible tools to protect geographically linked products in the absence of, or alongside, specialized GI regimes. While not a perfect equivalent to GI protection, certification marks help safeguard reputation, prevent misuse of regional names, and facilitate branding for local and artisanal producers.

Why GIs Matter

GIs are not just heritage labels, they are regulatory and commercial instruments.¹⁵ Some benefits include providing cultural safeguards and authenticity in that GIs formalize the link between a product and its culture, name-protecting terms that can be diluted by mass production and mislabelling.¹⁶ This helps stop misleading uses of the name in global markets.¹⁷ Additionally, they provide economic value for producers of a given product by protecting a name and attaching traceability/quality standards; GIs can allow producers to capture a premium, support tourism, and create market niches for authentic, locally made goods.¹⁸ Evidence from diverse GI experiences shows gains in price, market access and community branding when governance and market linkages are effective.¹⁹

Another benefit and importance of GIs is offering consumer protection and differentiation. GIs help consumers identify products with particular provenance and predictable qualities that are useful in crafts, foods and other artisanal goods.²⁰

However it is important to note that GIs require institutional capacity (administrative systems, policing and enforcement), clear governance (who decides standards and shares revenues), and market strategies (labelling, enforcement against counterfeits, and channels to reach premium markets) to inform beneficial management and returns.²¹ If governance is weak, the gains may not reach artisans; if enforcement is absent, the name can still be misused abroad. Legal protection also interacts with existing IP rights (trademarks, certification marks) and trade rules as such governments and communities must design GI schemes with both law and local realities in mind.²² WIPO’s role in many projects is precisely to help bridge those gaps through training, drafting model specifications, and facilitating stakeholder consultations.²³

Would GI’s work for the Maasai Shuka?

Kenya and Tanzania’s Maasai people have long confronted the same problem, in that their iconic dress, often generically called the Maasai shuka, has been widely used and misappropriated by global brands without benefit to Maasai communities. Over the last decade the Maasai Intellectual Property Initiative (MIPI) created a formal legal vehicle to assert control over the Maasai brand, using a mix of collective trademarks, certification marks and licensing strategies rather than a GI per se.²⁴ MIPI aims to create authenticity standards, a licensing mechanism, and community governance that would allow the Maasai to license their name and cultural expressions, and obtain royalties while policing misuse.²⁵ MIPI is an instructive “model” for turning communal cultural assets into enforceable IP that generates income and control.²⁶

The Maasai have focused on trademarks, certification and licensing because their cultural identifiers span two countries and many communities. GIs are territorial and product-based; they work very effectively for place-bound products (like a cloth woven in specified villages).²⁷ The choice between GI, trademark and other tools must therefore reflect the cultural geography of the product.²⁸ Additionally, the Maasai initiative invested heavily in forming a legal entity, MIPI, with a constitution and distribution rules so revenues can be managed transparently.²⁹ Ghana’s Kente GI will similarly need robust, locally legitimate governance structures to ensure weavers, not only intermediaries, capture economic benefits. Experience shows that legal registration without community structures can leave artisans out of the gains.³⁰

The Maasai example highlights the difficulty of policing misuse internationally. In contrast, Kente’s GI will give Ghana powerful enforcement tools in national and some international fora, but sustained market monitoring, cooperation with trading partners, and, where possible, bilateral or multilateral recognition will be needed to reduce inappropriate commercial uses abroad.

As such, a geographical indication would not be the most effective tool for the Maasai shuka. Because GIs are territorial and tied to specific products from defined regions, they struggle to accommodate cultural assets that span multiple countries and communities. The Maasai’s use of collective trademarks, certification marks, and licensing through MIPI illustrates a more flexible approach, allowing cross-border protection, enforcement of authenticity standards, and equitable sharing of revenues. This example demonstrates that while GIs are powerful for place-bound products, safeguarding transnational cultural heritage often requires a combination of IP rights supported by robust community governance.

Conclusion

Ghana’s registration of Kente as a Geographical Indication is both a cultural affirmation and a legal experiment. It recognizes that Kente’s meaning and value are anchored in place-based weaving knowledge and community traditions, and it gives Ghana a legal lever against copyists and mislabellers. But the real test lies after registration: how well will the GI be translated into clear product specifications, inclusive governance, market linkage and enforcement so that artisans, not just brands or middlemen benefit.