Supporting smallholder farmers' decisions on legume use in East Africa - The LegumeCHOICE approach

East African farming systems are diverse but are generally characterized by mixed croplivestock production with a mix of cereals, roots, legumes, livestock and tree crops.Legumes offer many livelihood and natural resource management benefits but are generally underutilized in smallholder systems especially in the case of tree and forage legumes.Through a research for development project called LegumeCHOICE we developed a classification of multipurpose legumes and defined the various farm functions that each class and species fulfilled using an expert scoring system.We went on to develop a simple decision support tool based on this work to help decision makers prioritize different legume types to meet expressed needs of smallholders in East Africa when considering legume interventions.