Cowpeas, peanuts and bambara groundnuts ( Vigna subterranea) are important pulses or dry grain legumes in the West of Africa; hence low cost technologies that increase their productivity could entail major nutritional and social impacts. Field experiments conducted in Ghana, in Africa, have shown 40% to 100% increments to production, after the use of rhizobium inoculants supplied by Embrapa.
In light of the above, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research's Savanna Agricultural Research Institute (CSIR-SARI), Embrapa's partner institution in Africa, hopes to increase the scale of the production of inoculants and ensure the distribution of the product to 20,000 growers. For that purpose, Embrapa has collaborated to transfer quality control protocols and technical expertise technique for staff training. This project aimed at establishing strict inoculant quality control procedures, and training technicians and professionals to perform quality control during the use of molecular biology techniques and the isolation and selection of rhizobium strains at CSIR-SARI.