Data Management Challenges for Translational Agricultural Research in West Africa: The Case of the Crops Research Institute, Ghana

The establishment of robust, long-term data management strategies remains especially challenging in low-resourced and applied research contexts. Drawing on qualitative methods including ethnographic fieldwork and survey data collected from August to December 2023, this paper discusses ongoing concerns around data practices within Ghana’s Crops Research Institute (CRI), a premier West African facility for translational agricultural research. This case exemplifies the concerns emerging from a lively and productive research environment, effectively contributing to basic and applied research for a variety of publics, where, however, the infrastructure is fragile and institutional memory resides mainly in people rather than in computational systems. CRI researchers recognise the key components of effective data stewardship but encounter significant material and administrative obstacles that prevent these ideals from being fully realised. Using social scientific understandings of institutional memory and epistemic cultures, the paper highlights three key reasons for such difficulties: (1) frustrated epistemic cultures, which entrench the community’s difficulties in implementing known necessary practices; (2) data sedimentation, with successive layers of processed and summarised knowledge accumulating on top of earlier research records; and (3) epistemic precarity, that is, a widely perceived gap between understanding what is needed and having the capacity to meet those needs. The picture that emerges is not about insufficient commitment to data sharing and effective long-term management, but rather about structural conditions that make continuity in data practices precarious. If open science aims to effectively engage resource-constrained settings, it must address the lack of relevant infrastructure and administration rather than presuming inadequacies and lack of commitment in research cultures.