As a food and source of income, the Bambara groundnut is considered to be the third most important leguminous crop in those African countries where it is grown, after peanut and cowpea.

The Bambara groundnut is thought to have originated in West Africa, particularly in areas now known as Nigeria, Cameroon, and the Central African Republic.

[6] The spread of V. subterranea beyond its native range is closely linked to the interplay of human migration, trade, colonialism and agricultural practices.

In West Africa, it is grown in countries such as Benin, Ghana, Togo, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau, and Senegal.

On the Indian Ocean Islands, it is found in Madagascar, where it is known locally as voanjobory or voanjabory and remains an important component of traditional cuisine.

[15] In the Caribbean, it is grown in Dominican Republic where it is known as "manicongo",[16] it was once common in local markets but has since declined in prevalence over the past decades.

[17] This particular lineage, descends from seeds that were carried to the Americas by enslaved people during the Atlantic slave trade and the Age of Discovery.

[20] The plant generally looks like bunched leaves arising from branched stems, which form a crown on the soil surface.

[19] Several factors are essential for promoting cross-pollination in Bambara and these include a proper nursery habitat, short day lengths (<12h), an average temperature of 26 °C, which is necessary for optimum flowering and pod formation and a relative humidity of 90%.

Domesticated versions are more compact, have fleshy pods that wrinkle as they dry, with longer, less slender, and more erect petioles, and larger seeds (11–15 mm long).

[11] Bambara groundnut is tolerant to salinity, but high sodium chloride concentration in the soil will result in yield losses.

[19] Before sowing, the seeds can be treated with pesticides to prevent insect and fungal attack, and being eaten by bush fowl (Numida meleagris).

Priming the seeds with water by soaking them overnight and then drying them before sowing improves seedling emergence, vigour and yield.

[19] Sowing is usually performed manually by peasant farmers in tropical Africa, but it can also be done mechanically on industrial farms using modified soya bean planters.

Despite its suitability for intercropping systems due to its ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen,[26] a non-negligible proportion of farmers grow the Bambara groundnut in monoculture and report that its performance is better as a single crop.

[28] The Bambara bean typically takes about 130–150 days to mature, but early or late harvests only marginally reduce the yield.

However, there is a lack of evidence to support this claim, with reports of fungal attacks by Rhizoctonia solani in Southern Thailand, and Cercospora canescens and Colletotrichum capsici in Nigeria, causing brown blotch disease.

The top six Bambara groundnut producing countries in Africa in 2018 include Burkina Faso, Niger, Cameroon, Mali, Togo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo with a total production of 0.06, 0.05, 0.04, 0.03, 0.02, and 0.01 million tonnes, respectively.

[27][30] The yield level of Bambara groundnut in Africa varies from 0.6 to 1 tonne per hectare, depending on variety and production conditions.

However, unshelled mean yields of up to 3 tonnes per hectare were reported when cultivating some landraces in the transition agro-ecological zone in Nigeria .

[7] ANFs can be removed or lowered by a variety of treatments: The seeds are used for food, beverages because of their high protein content[11] and for digestive system applications.

[11] In West Africa, the nuts are eaten as a snack, roasted and salted, processed into cake, or as a meal, boiled similarly to other beans.

[24] In South Eastern Nigeria, particularly in Enugu, the dried Bambara beans are ground into a fine powder, then mixed with palm oil, water and, more rarely, vegetables (e.g., utazi), then poured into banana leaf wraps or one-liter cellophane bags before being boiled into a pudding to make okpa, a common breakfast food.

During the rainy season in many parts of central Nigeria, the fresh Bambara beans are cooked with their shells still on them, then eaten as a snack.

Bambara groundnut milk can be fermented with lactic acid bacteria to make a probiotic beverage that not only increase the economic value of the nutritious legume but also help in addressing malnutrition.

[40] The primary goal of Bambara improvement programs is to focus on seed yield and nutritional quality traits.

The adoption of traditional plant breeding methods to enhance nutritional benefits of locally grown food crops such as Bambara groundnut is an economic and affordable strategy to decrease malnutrition in Africa.