Processing, nutritional composition and health benefits of finger millet in sub-saharan Africa

The term millet is derived from the French word “mille’’ which means thousand, with a handful of millet containing up to 1000 grains (Shahidi & Chandrasekara, 2013). Millet belongs to the group of small-seeded species of cereal crops or grains which are annual plants (Shiihii et al., 2011). Finger millet, a member of the millet group and also known as ragi or tamba (Jideani et al., 1996; Ramashia et al., 2018) is so called due to its growth form of panicles which takes the form of several fingers (Sood et al., 2017). The grain belongs to the family Poaceae which originated in Ethiopia and the sub-family Chloridodeae (Pradeep & Sreerama, 2015; Sood et al., 2016; Ramashia et al., 2018). Different cultivars of FM grain exist: brown, light brown and white (Devi et al., 2014; Kumar et al., 2016), with grain colour used as the distinct means of cultivar differentiation. The white cultivars have been developed mainly for the baking industry, the brown and light brown types used for porridge while the brown cultivar is utilised for brewing traditional opaque beer in Southern Africa (Sood et al., 2017).