Cereal banking is one of the risk management strategies that have been employed to hold food reserves at the community level. The purpose is mainly to smooth consumption, especially during lean periods, providing a buffer when disaster strikes and a guard against food price fluctuations. It is a widely practiced community-based risk management strategy in arid and semiarid regions including West Africa. But very few empirical studies about this topic exist. Using propensity-score matching, we match similar communities with and without cereal banking schemes and compare their food security and nutrition security outcome indicators. The results show that cereal banking reduced food gap and inter-seasonal food price dispersions by 25 % and 31 %, respectively. We conclude that despite factoring in important costs, communities that operate a functional cereal banking scheme can better manage their food security and livelihood security needs, making them more resilient to future climate and market shocks.