Water scarcity is a major challenge in the Sahel region of West Africa. Water scarcity in combination with prevalent soil degradation has severely reduced the land productivity in the region. The decrease in the resiliency of food security systems of the marginalized population has huge societal implications which often leads to mass migrations and conflicts.

This paper investigates the effectiveness of interventions at 18 WFP sites in southern Niger using vegetative greenness observations from the Landsat 7 satellite. The pre - and post-intervention analysis shows that vegetation greenness after the half-moon intervention was nearly 50% higher than in the pre-intervention years. The vegetation in the intervened area was more than 25% greener than the nearby control area. Together, the results indicate that the half-moons are effective adaptations to the traditional land management systems to increase agricultural production in arid ecosystems, which is evident through improved vegetation conditions in southern Niger.

The analysis shows that the improvement brought by the interventions continues to provide benefits. Continued application of these adaptation techniques on a larger scale will increase agricultural production and build resilience to drought for subsistence farmers in West Africa. A quantifiable increase in the efficacy of local-scale land and water management techniques, and the resulting jump in large-scale investments to scale similar efforts will help farmers enhance their resiliency in a sustainable manner will lead to a reduction in food security shortages.