Recent drastic changes in Africa are also leading the transformation of regional agricultural system and its products. “Value addition” is a way to amplify the role of agriculture and its products that retains tremendous potential to improve the livelihoods of the poor in Africa. Thought it will be emphasized more along the changes of regional agricultural system, the fundamental scientific information to generate breeding strategies for value addition of various crops especially for local consumption is currently lacking.
To fill the gap, some activities were started to establish the methodology to evaluate the quality of grains and tubers, which can be utilized for the characterization of the germplasm in IITA GRC, and selection of breeding materials. Currently, FT-IR 6400 (JASCO), which facilitated with the units for both Near- and Mid-Infrared scanning capacities, Grain scanner (Satake) for the evaluation of grain size and color, color evaluation system consisted of standard color chart, handheld scanner and tablet computer have been introduced by EDITS project, and are available for use