Plant Resources of Tropical Africa
Encyclopedia
Plant Resources of Tropical Africa, known by its acronym PROTA, is an international programme concerned with making scientific information about utility plant
s accessible in Africa
, supporting their sustainable use to reduce poverty
.
of tropical Africa better known. PROTA also intends to promote opportunities for the sustainable use of plants to the public and private sectors, making a difference to the people whose livelihoods depend on plants.
found in Tropical Africa
. The species reviews contained in each volume are available on CD-ROM, and for free from PROTA online. PROTA plans to publish review articles on some 8,000 plants.
The PROTA Handbook is unusual because it is compiled as much from obscure publications as it is from peer-reviewed and popular literature, gathered throughout Africa and Europe. Species review articles are written by authors from around the world, and cover a range of information. A book review of PROTA 3: Dyes and tannins noted that "the information contained in this volume highlights a number of lesser known species, and is a rich source of interesting information for anyone working at the interface of ethnobotany
and domestication, and as such is a must have."
Apart from PROTA 3: Dyes and tannins, publications are present in English and French, on Cereals and pulses (2006), Vegetables (2004), Timbers 1 (2008), Medicinal plants 1 (2008) and Vegetable oils (2007).
Stakeholder consultations have been held over the past five years for all the six completed commodity groups, and have led to six ‘PROTA recommends…’ series booklets from which universities can pick ideas for interesting thesis subjects, national governments can find information on the endangered plant species on their territories conservation
, and rural development agencies can get ideas for agricultural diversification.
To celebrate the first 10 years of PROTA two publications came out in 2010. The first publication is called Promising African plants and presents 3 examples of species which have been rediscovered by small-holders successfully, and 22 species, which were not selected for pilot projects, but which are promising or interesting and should be promoted for research resulting in improved product quality and market strategies.
The second publication is called Updated list of species and commodity grouping / Liste actualisée des espèces et de leurs groupes d'usage and is a much expanded version of the first checklist made in 2002, incorporating data from 10 years of editing work for the PROTA information system.
Furthermore, the records contain the results of a meta-analysis from a large collection of agricultural and botanical databases, conducted successfully in cooperation with the ICON Group International. The websites, which allowed their databases to be harvested, are properly acknowledged in the ‘starter kits’.
Although the layout and search options of PROTA4U will still need some fine-tuning, we are confident that the data collected will help to facilitate and speed up the validation process, and also will make the information system more dynamic and subject to a continuous updating process. ‘Comments’ fields in both validated review articles and ‘starter kit’ records will allow visitors to add remarks and improvements to the existing texts.
The possibilities of this interactive database and its derived applications are enormous, both for its current audience of researchers and other agricultural experts, but also for farmers, who will have access to mobile phone versions of PROTA materials, enhanced with assisted reading. In the near future we will make available a list of species playing a role in the climate change
, through the star-rating system.
To gain insight in the process through which PROTA information impacts on the agricultural development process in tropical Africa, questionnaires were sent to all those who had acquired PROTA books through the CTA credit point system. The number of respondents was highest in Nigeria and Ethiopia. Analysis of the answers made clear that PROTA information is used at all levels of agricultural development, in policy making and research, in higher education and vocational training, and by extension workers and farmers. The most exciting results from the questionnaires were the concrete examples of use of PROTA information: clients in action ! To obtain more detail on specific cases, it was decided to follow-up the questionnaires through personal interviews with respondents in Nigeria and Ethiopia in 2009.
Main conclusions of the mission were:
• PROTA succeeds in providing access to comprehensive information on plant resources to a wide range of direct target users.
• PROTA has contributed to capacity building of agricultural extension workers, farmers, subject matter specialists, and NGO workers by positively influencing the content of training manuals.
• By the respondents alone, a total of 9,200 farmers and 246 extension agents were trained in Nigeria and Ethiopia using PROTA information.
• Adoption of improved technologies contributed to increased production by farmers. Farmers in Nigeria e.g. reported increased yields of maize, cowpeas, and vegetables.
• Income generating opportunities have improved for thousands of farmers who adopted promising species and technologies promoted by PROTA.
• PROTA information has been used in preparing proposals for development projects, many of them being accepted for funding, and many resulting in partnerships between organizations.
• PROTA publications have become a reliable reference for researchers. The books are cited by many authors in their scientific papers.
• Impact in the area of policy development became apparent in Ethiopia, where a consultant prepared Crop Protection Policy Reviews using PROTA information and using a PROTA-inspired format.
• PROTA has succeeded to increase the interest of students in plant resources research and to improve on the quality of students’ research. Over 5,000 students in Nigeria and Ethiopia have been taught by respondents alone, using PROTA information.
Training of trainers in e-resources
ITOCA (Information, Training and Outreach Centre for Africa) assisted PROTA in 2009 to promote the use of PROTA resources in Sub-Saharan Africa through programme advocacy, training, marketing and support activities aimed at the research and academic communities in the region.
ITOCA developed and field-tested suitable course training modules for the PROTA web database, and conducted 3-4 day workshops on PROTA resources together with complementing e-resources databases: TEEAL
(The Essential Electronic Agricultural Library), AGORA
(Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture), HINARI (Health Internetwork Access Research Initiative) and OARE (Online Access Research in Environment).
PROTA resources were also promoted through ITOCA’s websites, Research4Life Africa User forum broadcasts, demonstrations and booth displays and presentations at conferences and newsletter articles to encourage utilization and adoption of the resource. A user support help-desk for the region was also established.
Plant
Plants are living organisms belonging to the kingdom Plantae. Precise definitions of the kingdom vary, but as the term is used here, plants include familiar organisms such as trees, flowers, herbs, bushes, grasses, vines, ferns, mosses, and green algae. The group is also called green plants or...
s accessible in Africa
Africa
Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...
, supporting their sustainable use to reduce poverty
Poverty
Poverty is the lack of a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution is inability to afford basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live...
.
Mission
PROTA’s stated mission is to synthesise all the information available for approximately 8,000 plants used in tropical Africa, and make it widely accessible in various media. In other words PROTA is dedicated to make the lesser-known useful biodiversityBiodiversity
Biodiversity is the degree of variation of life forms within a given ecosystem, biome, or an entire planet. Biodiversity is a measure of the health of ecosystems. Biodiversity is in part a function of climate. In terrestrial habitats, tropical regions are typically rich whereas polar regions...
of tropical Africa better known. PROTA also intends to promote opportunities for the sustainable use of plants to the public and private sectors, making a difference to the people whose livelihoods depend on plants.
How PROTA works
The programme operates through an international network of institutional partners and collaborators of the PROTA Foundation, and has representatives in 20 African countries.Publications
The PROTA Handbook is an illustrated encyclopaedia of utility plant speciesSpecies
In biology, a species is one of the basic units of biological classification and a taxonomic rank. A species is often defined as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. While in many cases this definition is adequate, more precise or differing measures are...
found in Tropical Africa
Tropical Africa
Although tropical Africa is most familiar in the West as depicted by its rain forests, this region of Africa is far more diverse. While the tropics are thought of as regions with warm to hot moist climates caused by latitude and the tropical rain belt, the geology of areas, particularly mountain...
. The species reviews contained in each volume are available on CD-ROM, and for free from PROTA online. PROTA plans to publish review articles on some 8,000 plants.
The PROTA Handbook is unusual because it is compiled as much from obscure publications as it is from peer-reviewed and popular literature, gathered throughout Africa and Europe. Species review articles are written by authors from around the world, and cover a range of information. A book review of PROTA 3: Dyes and tannins noted that "the information contained in this volume highlights a number of lesser known species, and is a rich source of interesting information for anyone working at the interface of ethnobotany
Ethnobotany
Ethnobotany is the scientific study of the relationships that exist between people and plants....
and domestication, and as such is a must have."
Apart from PROTA 3: Dyes and tannins, publications are present in English and French, on Cereals and pulses (2006), Vegetables (2004), Timbers 1 (2008), Medicinal plants 1 (2008) and Vegetable oils (2007).
Stakeholder consultations have been held over the past five years for all the six completed commodity groups, and have led to six ‘PROTA recommends…’ series booklets from which universities can pick ideas for interesting thesis subjects, national governments can find information on the endangered plant species on their territories conservation
Conservation movement
The conservation movement, also known as nature conservation, is a political, environmental and a social movement that seeks to protect natural resources including animal, fungus and plant species as well as their habitat for the future....
, and rural development agencies can get ideas for agricultural diversification.
To celebrate the first 10 years of PROTA two publications came out in 2010. The first publication is called Promising African plants and presents 3 examples of species which have been rediscovered by small-holders successfully, and 22 species, which were not selected for pilot projects, but which are promising or interesting and should be promoted for research resulting in improved product quality and market strategies.
The second publication is called Updated list of species and commodity grouping / Liste actualisée des espèces et de leurs groupes d'usage and is a much expanded version of the first checklist made in 2002, incorporating data from 10 years of editing work for the PROTA information system.
PROTA4U
The structure of the new PROTA web database PROTA4U has been developed in the course of 2009. It is a combination of PROTA’s highly standardized expert-validated review articles (PROTAbase) and yet-to-be-validated ‘starter kits’ for all other useful plants. These ‘starter kits’ are pre-filled with basic information from PROTA’s databases SPECIESLIST (important synonyms, uses, basic sources of information) and AFRIREFS (‘grey’ literature).Furthermore, the records contain the results of a meta-analysis from a large collection of agricultural and botanical databases, conducted successfully in cooperation with the ICON Group International. The websites, which allowed their databases to be harvested, are properly acknowledged in the ‘starter kits’.
Although the layout and search options of PROTA4U will still need some fine-tuning, we are confident that the data collected will help to facilitate and speed up the validation process, and also will make the information system more dynamic and subject to a continuous updating process. ‘Comments’ fields in both validated review articles and ‘starter kit’ records will allow visitors to add remarks and improvements to the existing texts.
The possibilities of this interactive database and its derived applications are enormous, both for its current audience of researchers and other agricultural experts, but also for farmers, who will have access to mobile phone versions of PROTA materials, enhanced with assisted reading. In the near future we will make available a list of species playing a role in the climate change
Climate change
Climate change is a significant and lasting change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over periods ranging from decades to millions of years. It may be a change in average weather conditions or the distribution of events around that average...
, through the star-rating system.
Dissemination
In collaboration with grassroots organizations, eight pilot projects – six on vegetables and two on dyes and tannins – have been implemented in Kenya, Madagascar, Burkina Faso, Benin and Ghana. It has been a learning process for PROTA and not all pilots were equally successful. However, the Farmer Field Schools in Kenya successfully tried out some ‘forgotten’ vegetables like the spider plant (Cleome gynandra). The dye sorghum pilot in Benin was so interesting and promising that it is presently being scaled up to address a number of socio-economic and agronomic issues. In all, it is estimated that about 800 farmers, craftsmen and processors benefited directly from the projects, whereas much larger numbers were reached through field days and demonstrations.Impact monitoring & evaluation
Clients in actionTo gain insight in the process through which PROTA information impacts on the agricultural development process in tropical Africa, questionnaires were sent to all those who had acquired PROTA books through the CTA credit point system. The number of respondents was highest in Nigeria and Ethiopia. Analysis of the answers made clear that PROTA information is used at all levels of agricultural development, in policy making and research, in higher education and vocational training, and by extension workers and farmers. The most exciting results from the questionnaires were the concrete examples of use of PROTA information: clients in action ! To obtain more detail on specific cases, it was decided to follow-up the questionnaires through personal interviews with respondents in Nigeria and Ethiopia in 2009.
Main conclusions of the mission were:
• PROTA succeeds in providing access to comprehensive information on plant resources to a wide range of direct target users.
• PROTA has contributed to capacity building of agricultural extension workers, farmers, subject matter specialists, and NGO workers by positively influencing the content of training manuals.
• By the respondents alone, a total of 9,200 farmers and 246 extension agents were trained in Nigeria and Ethiopia using PROTA information.
• Adoption of improved technologies contributed to increased production by farmers. Farmers in Nigeria e.g. reported increased yields of maize, cowpeas, and vegetables.
• Income generating opportunities have improved for thousands of farmers who adopted promising species and technologies promoted by PROTA.
• PROTA information has been used in preparing proposals for development projects, many of them being accepted for funding, and many resulting in partnerships between organizations.
• PROTA publications have become a reliable reference for researchers. The books are cited by many authors in their scientific papers.
• Impact in the area of policy development became apparent in Ethiopia, where a consultant prepared Crop Protection Policy Reviews using PROTA information and using a PROTA-inspired format.
• PROTA has succeeded to increase the interest of students in plant resources research and to improve on the quality of students’ research. Over 5,000 students in Nigeria and Ethiopia have been taught by respondents alone, using PROTA information.
Training of trainers in e-resources
ITOCA (Information, Training and Outreach Centre for Africa) assisted PROTA in 2009 to promote the use of PROTA resources in Sub-Saharan Africa through programme advocacy, training, marketing and support activities aimed at the research and academic communities in the region.
ITOCA developed and field-tested suitable course training modules for the PROTA web database, and conducted 3-4 day workshops on PROTA resources together with complementing e-resources databases: TEEAL
TEEAL
TEEAL is The Essential Electronic Agricultural Library. Launched in 1999, it is a self-contained agricultural research library with full-text articles and graphics of over 200 major journals. TEEAL is a project of Cornell University's in cooperation with over 60 major scientific publishers,...
(The Essential Electronic Agricultural Library), AGORA
AGORA
AGORA is the acronym for the Access to Global Online Research on Agriculture program. It was started by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations with a number of publishing partners to provide developing countries access to scientific information on food, agriculture,...
(Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture), HINARI (Health Internetwork Access Research Initiative) and OARE (Online Access Research in Environment).
PROTA resources were also promoted through ITOCA’s websites, Research4Life Africa User forum broadcasts, demonstrations and booth displays and presentations at conferences and newsletter articles to encourage utilization and adoption of the resource. A user support help-desk for the region was also established.
See also
- Tropical AfricaTropical AfricaAlthough tropical Africa is most familiar in the West as depicted by its rain forests, this region of Africa is far more diverse. While the tropics are thought of as regions with warm to hot moist climates caused by latitude and the tropical rain belt, the geology of areas, particularly mountain...
- Index: Flora of Tropical Africa
- AfrotropicAfrotropicThe Afrotropic is one of the Earth's eight ecozones. It includes Africa south of the Sahara Desert, the southern and eastern fringes of the Arabian Peninsula, the island of Madagascar, southern Iran and extreme southwestern Pakistan, and the islands of the western Indian Ocean. It was formerly...
- Ecology of AfricaEcology of AfricaThe natural history of Africa encompasses some of the well known megafauna of that continent.Natural history is the study and description of organisms and natural objects, especially their origins, evolution, and interrelationships.-Flora:...
- International Tropical Timber OrganizationInternational Tropical Timber OrganizationThe International Tropical Timber Organization is an intergovernmental organization that promoted conservation of tropical forest resources and their sustainable management, use and trade.-Organization:...
- Natural environmentNatural environmentThe natural environment encompasses all living and non-living things occurring naturally on Earth or some region thereof. It is an environment that encompasses the interaction of all living species....
- BiodiversityBiodiversityBiodiversity is the degree of variation of life forms within a given ecosystem, biome, or an entire planet. Biodiversity is a measure of the health of ecosystems. Biodiversity is in part a function of climate. In terrestrial habitats, tropical regions are typically rich whereas polar regions...
- Climate changeClimate changeClimate change is a significant and lasting change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over periods ranging from decades to millions of years. It may be a change in average weather conditions or the distribution of events around that average...
External links
- PROTA website
- old database PROTAbase
- new database PROTA4U
- AAMPS - Association for African Medicinal Plants Standards
- Phytotrade
- ITTO - International Tropical Timber Organization
- CTATechnical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation ACP-EU (CTA)The Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation ACP-EU was established in 1983 under the Lomé Convention between the ACP countries and EU member states...
(credit point system) - Earthprint