Plant Resources of Tropical Africa, known by its acronym PROTA, is a retired NGO and interdisciplinary documentation programme active between 2000 and 2013. PROTA produced a large database and various publications about Africa's useful plants.
Purpose
PROTA was concerned with increasing accessibility to traditional knowledge and scientific information about many types of African plants including: dyes & tannins, fibers, medicinal plants, stimulants, tropical timbers, vegetables, tubers (carbohydrates), oil seeds, ornamental plants, forage plants, and cereals. PROTA supported the sustainable use of these useful plants to preserve culture, reduce poverty and hunger, and respond to climate change. To this end, PROTA's overall goal was synthesize diverse, published information for approximately 8,000 plants used in tropical Africa, then make it widely accessible through an online database and various book publications. In other words, PROTA was dedicated to making the useful plant biodiversity of tropical Africa better-known and respected.
PROTA's database and various publications are considered unique in their epistemological approach because they were compiled as much from obscure publications as from peer-reviewed and popular literature, gathered throughout Africa and Europe. In this way PROTA publications include Africa-centered references and perspectives, which is a major focus of the broader discipline of African studies. PROTA also was an international NGO registered in Nairobi, Kenya that used information from its publications to structure a number of community projects involving over 800 farmers in Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Kenya, and Madagascar.
Some of PROTA's other goals included:
to promote the sustainable use of plants to the public and private sectors
to facilitate socially inclusive, collaborative research about African plants from experts in Africa and elsewhere to make research about African plants more accessible to support intellectual property rights related to the commercial use of African plants to help graduate students and researchers identify research gaps to provide research-driven educational materials to vocational and farmer education programs in Africa
Current status
Funding
PROTA retired in 2013 while facing large operational costs after its funding expired. At the point of its retirement, about 50% of PROTA's encyclopedia series was complete. During its operation, PROTA received funds from the European Union's Directorate-General for International Partnerships, Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Netherlands Ministry of Agriculture, Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, Wageningen University, COFRA Foundation, International Tropical Timber Organization, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Since the program's retirement there have been ongoing efforts to fundraise and preserve PROTA's various publications and online database.
Preservation
As of 2022, the PROTA database Prota4U is still online in an archive-like capacity at Wageningen University with articles written in English and French. Information in the PROTA database can also be accessed at the website Pl@ntUse–though in a different format. As of 2019, Prota4U had about 1,500 daily visitors and 500,000 unique visitors each year. All of the PROTA's encyclopedia volumes have been digitized and are available for free as Open access publications from the Wageningen University library. It is uncertain how much of the PROTA Recommends Series has been digitized.
Partners
The programme operated through an international network of institutional partners and collaborators of the PROTA Foundation. PROTA had representatives in 20 African countries and dual headquarters in Wageningen, Netherlands and Nairobi, Kenya. PROTA also had regional offices with institutional partners in Burkina Faso, France, Gabon, Ghana, Madagascar, Malawi, Uganda, and the United Kingdom. In Wageningen, PROTA also partnered with the EU funded, Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) and the now-retired Agromisa Foundation to help distribute its various publications. Agromisa and PROTA were considered suitable partners because they were both committed to bridging the gap between scientific knowledge and traditional knowledge and were open access publishers of books with practical information about sustainable agriculture for small-farmers in Africa.