Bambara groundnut has long been a neglected and understudied crop. Thanks to the new
orientations for the développement of agriculture and achievement of food security in Burkina Faso,
in recent years, studies on Bambara groundnut have experienced renewed interest. Despites
nutritional, agronomic and socio-economic importance and some studies carried out on this crop.
The diversity within Bambara groundnut cultivated remains poorly understood. The objective of this
study was to assess phenological morphological and agronomic characterization of 20 Bambara
groundnut accessions from National Institute for the Environment and Agricultural Research
(INERA) genebank. The experimental device used was a completely randomized Fisher blocks with
four replications on the site of University Centre of Tenkodogo. These accessions were evaluated
on 23 morphological characters including four qualitative characters and 19 quantitative characters.
Qualitative traits showed high proportion of oval terminal leaflet shape (70%), cream coloured seeds
(45%) and 80% presence of eyes of various shapes and colours. The analysis of quantitative
characters showed all the characters are discriminating except the plant spread (PlS) at the 5%
treshold with regard to morphological, physiological and agronomic traits and low coefficient of
variation (CV) values for the different phenological characters, except for the number of days from
sowing to 50% plantlet emergence (EMG50). Pearson correlation matrix indicated positive and
negative correlation. Most of the negative correlation was observed between phenological and
agronomic traits The dendrogram showed organization of the variability in three different groups on
the basis of the physiological, phenological and agronomic traits. The variability expressed among
INERA gene bank genotypes showed important variability, which can be exploited in Bambara
groundnut breeding programs using the clustering and associations of characters.

Bambara nut; Burkina Faso; characterization; morphological; phonological; variability