In material-resource poor countries like Mali, traditional medicine is the predominant practice and subsistence farmers with their collaborating regional scientists and extension specialists are quite amennable to using these materials for crop pest management. Eleven years of IPM Collaborative Research Support Program (CRSP)-Mali on-farm, participatory assessment / research, resulted in several suggested uses of traditional medicine for pest management. This USDA Higher Education Challenge grant funded research of an undergraduate extern to Mali resulted in a plan to identify potentially effective, local plant material products that may benefit Malian farmers for future pest management use. This research was a 4-step process of developing a plan for selection of medicinal plants of Mali with pest management potential. In Step 1,we searched peer refereed world literature for plants and criteria others used, interviewed with a traditional medicine practitioner in Mali, and collaborated with Malian scientists and subsistence farmers. In Step 2, we assembled full taxonomic information for the 40 suggested species and selected criteria to be used to identify pest management potential in medicinal plants, using the medicinal properties of neem, Azadirachta indica, as a known medicinal plant with pest management properties to test our matrix system. In Step 3, we subjected the 40 Malian plants to the criteria we selected. In Step 4, we evaluated the results of the matrix. This procedure should provide a focused, low-technology, non-instrumental method to identify plant extracts and other plant materials with insect management potential.