Fashion Law Institute Africa debuts summit, unveils continental report, journal

The Fashion Law Institute, Africa (FLIAfrica) has convened the inaugural Pan-African Fashion Law and Policy Summit (PAFALAPS 2026), bringing together legal practitioners, fashion entrepreneurs, fashion council leaders, country representatives, and policymakers from across five African regions for a landmark virtual summit on the legal and policy frameworks governing Africa’s fashion and creative economy.

The summit marked three historic firsts simultaneously: the establishment of PAFALAPS as Africa’s dedicated annual platform for fashion law and policy dialogue; the launch of the State of Fashion Law and Policy in Africa 2026 Report, the first comprehensive pan-continental legal analysis of the African fashion industry ever published; and the announcement of the inaugural issue of the Journal of African Fashion Law, Policy and Innovation (JAFaLPI), nearing completion of peer review.

The summit’s keynote address was delivered by Isioma Idigbe, partner at PUNUKA Attorneys and Solicitors, one of Nigeria’s foremost creative industries lawyers. Her opening thesis became the intellectual anchor of the entire day.

“African fashion is not emerging, it is here, it has arrived. What is only emerging is that African fashion brands are now beginning to be recognised internationally in their own right,” Idigbe said.

She traced the historical exploitation of Africa’s fashion heritage by major international houses – citing Dior’s Spring 2023 collection debuted at Cairo’s Court of Honor, Adidas’s collaboration with Africa’s first LVMH Prize winner, and the documented case of Burberry’s visit to Nigerian designer Draw by Lisa’s Lagos studio following which a collection bearing unmistakable resemblance to her Ankara work was released.

She framed the exploitation as structural: enabled by intellectual property (IP) frameworks designed for individual creators and commercial identifiers, not for communal, generationally transmitted heritage knowledge.

Idigbe also identified the supply chain gap as distinct from – and arguably more urgent than – the enforcement gap. She described how Nigeria’s inverted tariff structure, with high duties on raw materials and comparatively low duties on finished imported garments, makes it commercially rational to take Nigerian designs abroad for manufacturing and import the finished product at a fraction of the domestic designer’s price. Her call to the room was unambiguous: “These are the threads of justice, and it is time we moved them into law.”

Panel 1, moderated by Irinen Afen, managing partner of Caelum Partners and FLIAfrica’s Abuja State Representative brought together country and regional representatives to deliver the first coordinated snapshot of fashion law across five African regions. Their collective diagnosis was striking in its consistency: across every region, the same structural challenges recur.

From Cameroon, Sandra Djoko-Moyo, founder of KYRIA & Co. Legal Intelligence reported that IP registration costs in Cameroon are higher than in France, a structural anomaly that acts as a fundamental barrier to protection for the designers who need it most. She also reported the most significant IP court precedent in Cameroon’s history, established in 2024.

From Kenya, Stacy Sang, Advocate of the High Court and FLIAfrica’s Kenya Country Representative highlighted the Kenya Geographical Indications Bill 2026 as a significant emerging development, and pointed to the Maasai Intellectual Property Initiative as the continent’s most advanced model of community cultural IP reclamation launched in 2010 in response to the commercial use of Maasai iconography by brands including Louis Vuitton and Ralph Lauren, without recognition or compensation.

From South Africa, Mandisa Nzimande, founder of Nzimande MN Attorneys and FLIAfrica’s South Africa Country Representative described how the cost of legal assistance required to complete IP registration creates a registration gap, which in turn enables dupe culture: better-resourced actors registering designs first while original creators are left without legal protection. She cited the Maxhosa (Matrosa) v Zara case as her case study.

From Ghana, Dennis Akwaboah, commercial and IP lawyer and creator of the ‘The Law Behind the Fashion’ LinkedIn series mapped the full fashion value chain from raw materials to end of life, identifying a legal gap at every stage. His most striking data point: Kantamanto, Ghana’s second-hand clothing market, receives approximately 15 million garments per week, with around 40 percent becoming waste with no legal framework governing the end-of-life of fashion products. He used Ghana’s Geographical Indications Act passed in 2003 but with no registrations until 2024 as a cautionary example of legislation sitting dormant while cultural heritage remained exposed.

“If you are not protecting it, how can you say it is yours? Africa needs to protect almost everything it can protect and do it faster.”

Kélicia Massala, LL.M., managing editor of JAFaLPI identified three cross-cutting patterns from submissions to the journal: legal fragmentation across borders despite a highly interconnected creative industry; the structural mismatch between informal fashion economies and formal legal frameworks that assume documentation and institutional access; and the acceleration of AI, digital fashion, and platform economies faster than law can conceptualise them. Her conclusion: the problem is not absence of law or creativity. It is the absence of coordination.

For the first time in the continent’s history, fashion council leaders from four African regions convened on a shared platform. Panel 2, moderated by Dami (Oluseye Damilola) of Art by Oluseye Dami, brought together the Nigerian Fashion Council, the Egyptian Fashion and Design Council, the Fashion and Beauty Council of South Africa, and Uganda’s Pearl of African Fashion Alliance not to discuss whether collaboration is desirable, but to begin building it.

Olutoni Philip-Aina, CEO of BluVelvet Fashion Institute (BFI) and BluVelvet Fashion Consulting, and Executive Adviser to the Nigerian Fashion Council spoke to the NFC’s recent establishment and its approach to the industry: holistic, quality-driven, and grounded in the conviction that policy must be shaped by the people it is designed to serve. Susan Sabet, Co-Founder and Secretary General of the Egyptian Fashion and Design Council, presented Egypt’s active engagement with African Union fashion policy dialogue and the council’s preparation for the next edition of Egypt Fashion Week.