Building resilient farms and food systems requires making strong and well-informed decisions, which can be challenging. Land restoration in the drylands, particularly scaling Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) in Niger, emerged as an effective solution for restoring degraded lands and building resilient food systems. To sustain government efforts in this mission, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) developed a decision-making tool, “Sassaben Zamani” model to guide the implementation of FMNR, addressing the failure of restoration initiatives and optimizing resources. The model integrates biophysical, socioeconomic, and governance factors for FMNR suitability analysis. These factors were prioritized using the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) performed by up to 25 experts participating in the model validation workshop. The AHP process revealed that governance and socioeconomic factors dominate over biophysical factors for the success of FMNR (confidence interval [CI] = 8%). The overlay method was used to assign AHP process weights to the parameters and to perform the suitability map via the QGIS programming interface. Two communes in the Zinder region, Kwaya and Yekoua, were considered for model simulation. The findings revealed that, for the two communes, the suitable and moderately suitable areas for FMNR represent 42.5% and 51.5%, respectively. The proportion of the unsuitable site covers only 6% of the total area. The socioeconomic and governance maps provided guidance on the actions to be taken to improve the suitability of moderately and unsuitably situated areas. Taking the results of the model into account in decision-making for land restoration projects could thus improve their effectiveness and efficiency by avoiding blind piloting, thereby unlocking restoration potential and improving the resilience of farms and food systems.