How do climbing beans fit in farming systems of the eastern highlands of Uganda? Understanding opportunities and constraints at farm level.

Climbing beans offer potential for sustainable intensification in the East-African highlands, but their introduction requires a major change in the cropping systemcompared with the commonly grown bush bean. We explored farm-level opportunities, constraints and trade-offs for climbing bean cultivation in the eastern highlands of Uganda. We established current food self-sufficiency, income, investment costs and labour, and assessed the ex-ante, farm-level impact of four climbing bean options on these indicators. Input for this assessment were a detailed characterization of 16 farms of four types, and on-farm, experimental data of adaptation trials of climbing bean.