By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 14
A woman can build a business she does not legally own. Registration and a trademark are how she keeps it.
The most consequential line in the gender ministry’s February 2026 report was not the 1,485 women but a signature. On the same day, the ministry and the Business and Intellectual Property Authority signed an agreement to support the programme, folding formal registration and brand protection into a scheme that had until then run on skills. It reframed EntreprenHER: a trained woman with an unregistered business owns her labour but not, in law, her enterprise.
That distinction is where intellectual property meets development. A name, a recipe or a design is an asset only once it can be registered, defended and, if need be, sold. The Bipa partnership is an attempt to give these women that ownership rather than only the income.
Why an unregistered business is exposed
An enterprise that is not registered has no legal identity of its own. It cannot hold a trademark, sign an enforceable contract in its own name or stop a competitor from trading under the same brand. For a woman who has built a following around a product, that exposure is real: the goodwill she has created sits unprotected and copyable.
The primary account captured the problem in a participant’s words. One beneficiary said the support helps protect businesses ‘from being copied by others’, which is precisely the risk informality leaves open – the better the idea, the more worth taking.
Without registration, the more valuable the brand, the more freely it can be copied.
What the Bipa partnership actually provides
Bipa is Namibia’s registrar for both business and intellectual property. It registers close corporations and companies, and administers trademarks, patents, industrial designs, geographical indications, traditional knowledge and copyright, backed by an IP tribunal and a mediation centre under the BIPA Act of 2016. Channelling EntreprenHER women through it means a trade name can become a registered company and a brand a registered mark.
The practical value is a bundle. Registration gives an enterprise a legal identity that can bank, contract and bid; a trademark gives its brand a defensible boundary. Neither is available to a business that exists only as a woman and a stall.
Registration is the identity; a trademark is the fence around what that identity has built.
Brand as an asset a woman can hold
Bringing IP into a skills programme changes what a woman is building. A registered brand is an asset on its own – it can be licensed, franchised or passed on, and it raises the value of the enterprise beyond this season’s takings. For women concentrated in cosmetics, textiles and the creative trades, where the brand often carries much of the worth, that shift is significant.
It also alters her bargaining position. A producer with a registered mark negotiates with buyers and stockists as an owner of something defensible, not as an interchangeable supplier. Ownership, once formalised, is bargaining power in every deal that follows.
A protected brand is wealth a woman can hold, license or hand on – not just income she can spend.
Formalisation as economic strategy
Read at national scale, the Bipa deal is industrial policy in miniature. Namibia counts an estimated 27,000 female-owned businesses in agriculture, textiles, cosmetics and the creative industry, most of them informal. Moving even a share into the registry converts invisible activity into a taxable, contractable, financeable formal sector. Bipa’s chief executive tied the two together directly, arguing that the country’s economic growth is closely linked to the empowerment of women entrepreneurs.
The risk is that registration becomes paperwork without payoff. A woman who registers but gains no buyer, no protection she can afford to enforce and no finance has taken on formality’s cost without its return. The agreement earns out only if the registry leads to real ownership.
Formalising women-owned firms is not administration – it is how an informal economy becomes a countable one.
For an entrepreneur, an IP adviser or a policymaker, the Bipa agreement is the part of EntreprenHER with the longest reach: it decides whether these women leave with income or with assets they legally own. The decision it puts to any partner is whether to make registration and brand protection cheap and quick enough that a stallholder actually uses them, or to let ownership stay a privilege the informal majority cannot practically claim.
Sources: The Namibian – gender ministry empowers 1,485 women through skills; Business and Intellectual Property Authority (Bipa); Gender ministry empowers 1,485 women (The Namibian)
