December 20th, 2011

As most of FACT's partners, friends and followers will know, FACT's history is more-or-less built on Jatropha. FACT helped initiate, develop and finance jatropha projects in Honduras (Gota Verde), Mozambique (Bilibiza) and Mali (Garalo), and was among the first organisations to gather and publish factual knowlegde on the plant, its cultivation, harvesting, processing and use. This knowledge and knowhow resulted in the production of our Jatropha Handbook.

Now, in 2011, FACT has moved into a range of biofuels and bioenergy technologies, building expertise on crops and conversion technologies with still the same goal: assisting practitioners in developing countries with solid information with which they can develop their community energy projects.

However, we at FACT believed that there was still a lot of knowledge generated by the initial Jatropha projects that had not yet been disemminated. Therefore, FACT commissioned an assessment of the lessons learned from those three projects. The assignment was recently finished and the report can be found here: Jan de Jongh and Flemming Nielsen (2011): Lessons Learned: Jatropha for local development.

We sincerely hope that this report will support Jatropa practitioners around the world in their work, and we welcome your comments!