Plant Resources of Tropical Africa, known by its acronym PROTA, is a retired NGO and interdisciplinary documentation programme active between 2000 and 2013.

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.

PROTA also had regional offices with institutional partners in Burkina Faso, France, Gabon, Ghana, Madagascar, Malawi, Uganda, and the United Kingdom.

[12] 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.

Grubben, who had led projects commissioned by the United Nations International Board for Plant Genetic Resources; and Ameenah Gurib-Fakim, a biodiversity scientist who later became the President of Mauritius.

[18] Though organized by species according to conventional botanical nomenclature, PROTA encyclopedias also include vernacular names in major African languages such as Swahili where information was available.

As of 2019, than 30,000 PROTA encyclopedias had been printed in English and French and were distributed widely with the help of the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) and the now-retired Agromisa Foundation.

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.

[26] During this time, responses to these large crises in the international finance and philanthropy communities may have shifted interest away from ethnobotanical research programs like PROTA.