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Abstract: Colonial powers in West Africa emphasized agricultural research and development on export crops at the expense of food crops. The major exception was rice where both the British and French prioritized research despite its relatively minor role in the diets of most colonies. This paper analyzes the special status of rice in colonial development programs. It surveys the parallel development of centralized rice research capacity in both British and French colonies but their very different experiences immediately after independence. The final section describes the emerging set of international actors who facilitated the development of a regional approach to rice research shortly after independence.

Data and information management are key components of enabling a knowledge-sharing environment in the development sector. Improved physical and virtual availability, accessibility, and applicability of data and information increases the chances of it reaching intended audiences and providing them with new insights, evidence, or confirmation of assumptions. In this Special Issue of the KM4Dev Journal: Open research, open data, and your development organization: Best practices in information and data management for development we present six cases of open access and open data management approaches in diverse institutional settings around the world. Novel open data management tools and practices aim to support the discovery of solutions and answers to some of the world's most complicated problems; the data for which were previously hidden in numerous unpublished data sets with restricted access. There is increasing evidence that data quality increases as data collection is automated, and its analytical methods improved; therefore many organizations are currently addressing the technical and organizational challenges of open data management, trying to provide the components that will strengthen data curatorial and analytical capacity. From the digitization of documents for the Greek Parliament to the management of data and information for a large network of bean research organizations in Africa, we share how institutions of all types are working to make information openly available, accessible, and applicable for the purpose of global development. ; Peer Review