History

PROTA took off as a Wageningen University Project on 1 January 2000 as a result of a subsidy of € 1.5 million from the European Commission, supplemented with contributions from Wageningen University, the Netherlands Ministry of Agriculture and the Netherlands Ministry of Development Cooperation, together amounting to € 0.6 million.

The objectives of the Preparatory Phase were to study the viability of the undertaking by identifying partners, by preparing a tentative listing and subdivision of the useful plants of tropical Africa, by making a prototype of the PROTA Information System, and by reaching international consensus on the set-up. The PROTA Preparatory Phase officially ended on 30 September 2003.

It is estimated that an implementation period of about 10 years will be needed to complete the PROTA basic mission: build an information system on the approximately 7,000 useful plants of tropical Africa.

The First Implementation Phase 2003–2008 foresees the completion of about 3,500 species in 8 Commodity Groups.
During 2004, the first full year of implementation, one commodity group was completed.
In 2005, 2006 and 2007 three other commodity groups followed. Work on two other commodity groups is in progress.

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