The applied research supported by IDRC emphasised small scale processing of sorghum and pearl millet near the farm in West Africa, Eastern and Southern Africa, and India. The key hardware technology was the dry abrasive disc dehuller, which was able to remove the seedcoat. Women have traditionally decorticated sorghum and pearl millet to improve the taste and eating quality of the grains. Decorticated grains also benefit the flavour of the flour produced from milling. Manual decorticating was time and labour consuming; the dehuller technology was intended to free women from this drudgery. The experiences with research on processing of sorghum and millet in the semiarid areas of Africa between 1970 and 1987 were reviewed in the monograph Abrasivedisk Dehullers in Africa: from research to dissemination Bassey and Schmidt, 1989. This paper was widely distributed to institutions and libraries in the Third World.

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