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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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Backing First-Time SME Finance Vehicles in Emerging Markets: 10 Years of Data Reveals Successful Pathways — And the Role of Catalytic Capital
Earlier this year, the Dutch Good Growth Fund, managed by Triple Jump, along with Investisseurs & Partneraires (I&P) published comprehensive research based on data they’ve collected over the past decade, aiming to shed light on what makes SME finance work across emerging markets — and in Africa in particular. In this second article of their series on NextBillion, Julia Kho at Triple Jump and Marianne Vidal-Marin at I&P share key findings from this research, which revealed pathways that could enable first-time SME risk capital providers to move from concept to first investments — and showed how catalytic capital has enabled others to build lasting models.
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- Investing
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- impact investing, MSMEs, research
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Context Instead of Carbon: Why Climate Finance in Africa Must Shift its Focus from Mitigation to Adaptation
Global climate action has long been framed through a binary lens: either mitigation or adaptation. As Sheena Raikundalia at Kuza One explains, this framework shapes how funding flows, how projects are designed and even how “success” is measured: Mitigation attracts the bulk of funding because it produces measurable carbon outcomes and enables high-emitting countries to meet their net-zero targets, while adaptation's local benefits are harder to quantify, commodify or sell. She argues that this imbalance risks turning African landscapes into carbon farms for the Global North, and also obscures the fact that many of Africa’s most climate-smart solutions could be promising investments — if the current financing architecture would support them. NOTE: In celebration of our 20th anniversary, NextBillion is highlighting key guest articles from our two decades online. We’re currently focusing on the healthcare sector: You can read these featured articles below.
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- Agriculture, Environment, Investing
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Financing Off-Grid Solar: A Pioneering Provider in Honduras Shows the Impact of Diversified Funding
Honduras is one of the poorest countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, and many of its most remote regions remain unserved by the electricity grid. Richenda Van Leeuwen at Hummingbird Green Solutions and Richard Stuebi and Jesse Colman at Boston University explore how Soluz Honduras is bringing freezers and other solar products to these markets by leveraging a variety of different financing models — an approach that shows how diversified funding can enable businesses to serve even the hardest-to-reach areas and the poorest of customers.
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Africa Needs Jobs — the Agri-Food Industry Can Provide Them: How the Sector Can Boost its Impact on Employment Across the Continent
Sub-Saharan Africa’s working-age population is projected to increase by more than 20 million per year until 2050. Yet according to Loïc De Cannière at Incofin Investment Management, the region created "only" 9 million jobs per year on average during the first two decades of this century. He argues that if job growth can't keep pace with this growing demographic, unemployment will likely lead to more poverty, societal unrest and migratory pressures. The solution, he explains, is to support the industries with the biggest potential for job creation, starting with the agri-food sector.
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- Agriculture, Investing
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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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Time is a Social Innovator’s Most Precious Resource: Why Are So Many Funders Wasting It?
For social entrepreneurs and civil society innovators, time is a perpetually scarce resource. But according to Tanner Methvin at Impact Amplifier, in his decades of engagement with these innovators and their funders, he has often been shocked by how wasteful some of the funding world is with the ecosystem’s time. He argues that many funders don't fully understand the time demands imposed by their cumbersome systems for applying for grants or investments, or responding to requests for proposals. He explores these inefficiencies, and proposes a better way for funders to support the social innovation community.
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- Investing, Social Enterprise
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Are Impact Investors Really Listening?: Why Capturing Stakeholder Insights is Key to Impactful Investment Strategies
Collecting data is easy for impact investors; acting on it is harder. As Taanya Khare at Acumen explains, most impact investment firms turn data-driven insights into action through intentional spaces like investment committees or portfolio review sessions. But she argues that listening is about more than surveys or feedback loops — it requires investors to sit down with company teams to make sense of customer insights, identify blind spots and co-create better solutions and impact strategies. She shares what Acumen has learned from embedding listening and impact management into every stage of its investment process.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
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