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Interoperability is the Answer to Scaling Up E-mobility in Africa: What the Continent Can Learn from the EU and India’s Divergent Approaches
Electric mobility in Africa is an emerging but highly fragmented market, defined by uneven policies, diverse vehicle types and limited scale. As a result, according to Ashay Abbhi at Intellecap and Nyaga Kebuchi at Sustainable Transport Africa, interoperability has become a critical enabler for the sector. They explore how interoperability — the ability of battery or charging systems to work seamlessly with multiple fleets of vehicles — can turn distributed hardware systems into a usable network, and discuss how the EU and India’s different routes toward interoperability can inform Africa's e-mobility transition.
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- Energy, Technology, Transportation
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NextBillion’s Most Influential Articles of 2025: Announcing the Winners of Our Annual Contest
We've counted the votes in NextBillion’s “Most Influential Articles of the Year” contest, an annual tradition since 2012. The three winners are listed in this article. Congratulations to these guest writers, and to the other contestants in the contest, whose insights have clearly resonated with our readers this past year. And thank you to everyone who voted — and everyone who read and wrote for NextBillion in 2025. Best wishes for the new year!
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- Energy, Environment, Investing, Technology, Telecommunications
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Announcing NextBillion’s Most Influential Articles of 2025: Vote for Your Favorites by Jan. 4
NextBillion’s “Most Influential Articles of the Year” contest has been an annual tradition since 2012. As we do each December, we’ve highlighted 12 of our most-read articles from the past year: You can find links to them in this article, or on the homepage below. We invite you to read them and vote for the ones that influenced your thinking the most. You can vote up to once per hour between today (Dec. 19) and 11:59 pm EST on Jan. 4. We thank you for your support and engagement over these past 20 years, and we wish you a happy and prosperous 2026.
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- Energy, Environment, Finance, Investing, Technology, Telecommunications, Transportation
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AI Risk Management in Digital Finance: Protecting Africa’s Underbanked from Invisible Threats
Digital finance has been a game-changer for financial inclusion across Africa. But as information technology security analyst Nathaniel Adeniyi Akande explains, many communities remain excluded — and though AI-powered lending tools offer new opportunities to reach them, these tools also introduce new risks that can undermine trust or even exclude the people they are designed to serve. He argues that it is digital lenders’ responsibility to anticipate and mitigate these threats, and explores several practices that are essential to AI risk management in the sector.
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- Finance, Technology
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The World is Losing the Fight Against Malaria: Could Drones and AI Help Defeat the Disease Once and For All?
The fight against malaria has been one of the great global health success stories of the 21st century, as efforts to defeat the disease have prevented an estimated 2.2 billion malaria cases and saved 12.7 million lives. But as Yosuke Kaneko at SORA Technology explains, this progress has stalled in recent years — and as global development funding dries up, there are worrying signs that the problem could get worse. He argues that this situation calls for an openness to new, tech-driven solutions, and explores how SORA Technology is using drones equipped with AI-powered cameras to target mosquito breeding sites and eradicate the disease at its source.
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- Health Care, Technology
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Public Good vs. Profitable Exits: Why Public Innovation Agencies Must Stop Copying Venture Capital
A new class of venture capitalist is emerging, but they aren’t Wall Street financiers or Silicon Valley tech bros. As Emre Eren Korkmaz at the University of Oxford argues, they are public innovation agencies that are shifting their funding approach: Instead of supporting high-risk research and innovations aimed at delivering societal benefit, they have begun to adopt the logic of venture capital, favoring commercially viable projects that are more likely to secure follow-on private funding. He explores the downsides to this shift, arguing that the world needs these institutions to do what private capital cannot or will not: supporting innovation for the public good, not just for profitable exits.
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- Investing, Social Enterprise, Technology
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Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up: Bhutan and Fiji’s Contrasting Paths to Digital Transformation Reveal the Pros and Cons of Government and Market-Driven Approaches
The pursuit of digital competitiveness — the capacity and readiness to adopt digital technologies — has led to remarkable success stories in emerging markets, transforming public infrastructure and enhancing the delivery of social and financial services. But as Neeraj Lekhwar and Garima Singh at FinValue Advisors explain, this path remains challenging for many nations — particularly small countries. They share insights from a FinValue study involving Bhutan and Fiji: two countries with comparable sizes and socioeconomic structures that have approached their digital transformation very differently. The policy paths they've taken present contrasting examples of digital adoption strategies that provide valuable lessons for other small markets.
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- Finance, Technology
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The Emergence of InfraTech: How AI and Other Digital Technologies are Enabling Climate-Resilient Transportation Infrastructure in LMICs
An estimated 1 billion people around the world lack access to all-weather roads. As Caylee Talpert at AnyWay Solutions explains, this means that over 12% of the global population cannot travel to school or work reliably throughout the year. She highlights the impacts of this gap, and explores how artificial intelligence, satellite and drone technology, and other advanced "InfraTech" solutions are optimizing climate-resilient transportation infrastructure in low- and middle-income countries.
- Categories
- Technology, Transportation
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