West Africa has experienced increases in cultivated lands over the last 50 years as well as increasing rates of deforestation. Croplands have expanded to meet the food demands of a rapidly increasing population. Nevertheless, this region remains one of the most food-deprived places on the planet. While the food demands of an increasing population has to be met through cropland expansion or intensification on existing lands, it is important to evaluate the long-term environmental consequences of the ensuing land use change. However, reliable spatial data sets of cultivated lands are not available for the region; such data sets would be valuable for assessing the environmental consequences of land cover change, as well as the implications for food security. A review of the currently available moderate-resolution satellite-derived land cover data sets for the region finds them to be inadequate. Therefore, a new regional data set of the spatial distribution of croplands was created by synthesizing subnational cropland area statistics, a spatial map of population density, and a high resolution satellite-derived cropland intensity data set for the Sahel. The new data set appears to be an improvement over the existing data sets of cropland distribution, and is proposed here as a “stop-gap” measure to use within numerical ecosystem or climate models.