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Co-authors: Steve Davis, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; Jan Siemonsma, PROTA; Monique S.J.Simmonds, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

The people of Africa have a celebrated heritage of using the continent’s rich biodiversity, which includes over 7000 plant species of ethnobotanical value within the tropics alone. Contemporary people-plant relationships in tropical Africa reflect this tradition, but there is scope for plants to be more effectively used to alleviate poverty. Among the factors that has impeded this is in the past, is a limited availability of information. The Plant Resources of Tropical Africa (PROTA) Foundation was established to improve access to the data needed to accomplish the sustainable use of plant resources in tropical Africa. The Foundation’s programmes derive from the encyclopaedic PROTA Handbook of botanical monographs, compiled from literature sourced throughout Africa and Europe. This paper discusses the process of interpretation used by PROTA to transform such scientific information into common knowledge of plant use, citing recent examples from PROTA’s initiative on vegetable plants.