Despite decades of intensive research on Rhizobium-legume symbioses, we are still only beginning to understand the factors that influence the survival, persistence, efficiency and competition of rhizobial strains in various environmental conditions.

Research focused on the identification of both competitive and highly effective nitrogen-fixing strains has been limited because, so far, the only way to test competitive rhizobial strains has been to isolate individual strains and compare them one at a time in large-scale plant growth assays.

In Tanzania, N2Africa and a number of related projects jointly developed and applied a range of innovative communication approaches to scale-up improved legume technologies. To assess the effectiveness of these communications approaches, N2Africa, the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International (CABI), Farm Radio International (FRI) and other partners designed a survey tool using Computer Aided Telephone Interviews (CATI).