Legumes play an important role in a nutrition-focused agricultural strategy because they provide a myriad of environmental and nutritional benefits. To realize those benefits, legumes can be integrated as mono-cropping, intercropping, and rotation in a cropping system. The literature on the impact of legume-based cropping has been growing but not addressed in the case of Uganda. This study examines the impact of legume-based practices on food security and nutritional outcomes of small-holder farmers using a nationally representative household survey for Uganda. A multi-step approach was used. In the first step, I assess the impact of different legume-based cropping on household level food security outcomes (i.e., calorie and protein produced, crop income, HDDS and MAHFP), and child level nutrition outcomes (i.e., extent and prevalence of stunting, underweight and wasting) along the agriculture-food security-nutrition impact pathway. As a second step, I attempt to identify the pathway through which legumes integration influences consumption and nutrition-related outcomes. The first step results suggest a positive and significant association of some legume-based practices with production outcomes (e.g., robust results for legume-non-cereal rotation), and mixed or weak results for child nutrition outcomes. The impact on food consumption related outcomes (i.e., HDDS and MAHFP) remained insignificant in all cases except for legume non-cereal intercropping. In the second step, the study identified crop income as the main pathway to improve MAHFP and to reduce the prevalence of wasting, and production as the main pathway to increase HDDS.
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