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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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African Agriculture at a Climate Crossroads: Business Risks and Opportunities as the Continent Navigates the Growing Crisis
Africa’s food systems are under mounting pressure from climate change, as droughts, erratic rainfall, floods and heat waves increasingly undermine both crop and livestock production. But as Asamoah Oppong Zadok at Sustaina Harvest explains, despite the emergence of climate-smart innovations and resilience-focused initiatives, many stakeholders still prioritize short-term fixes and reactive crisis spending that leave deeper vulnerabilities intact. He argues that African agriculture faces a choice: remain trapped in a cycle of repeated shocks and emergency responses — or invest in technologies, ecosystems and people that can turn climate risk into opportunity, building healthy ecosystems and inclusive livelihoods over the long term.
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- Agriculture, Environment
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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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From Energy Access to Economic Empowerment: Workable Models for Financing a Just Transition in Emerging Markets
Today 2.1 billion people live without clean cooking fuels and technologies, and over 660 million people lack electricity access. Yet as Anthony Osijo at Bboxx points out, as global conversations largely focus on decarbonizing energy resources to combat climate change, these millions of households still cannot access essential products and services the rest of the world takes for granted. He argues that emerging markets can't simply be left in the dark because their kerosene lamps and diesel generators aren’t environmentally viable, especially if they lack access to suitable alternatives. He explores ways to finance and deliver a just climate transition — while also eradicating energy poverty.
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- Energy, Environment
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To Change the World, Change Your Economics: How Degrowth Can Shrink Overconsumption in the Global North While Allowing the Global South to Grow
The global economy largely operates under a neoclassical economic structure, which emphasizes a reliance on markets, a deference to the private sector and a focus on constant growth. But according to Matt Orsagh and Steve Rocco at the Arketa Institute, this structure has a fatal flaw: It operates on a planet with finite resources and limited places to put our waste, but assumes that economic growth can go on forever. They argue that the world needs a new form of economics that reflects our environmental realities, one focused on "degrowth" — i.e., an effort to equitably downscale production and consumption in the Global North, without putting undue restrictions on the development of the Global South. They explore what this change might mean for the world's economy, the investing community — and countries in the Global North and South.
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- Energy, Environment
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Beyond Shock, Money or Mandate: Why African Banks Aren’t Taking Bold Climate Action — And What it Will Take to Move Forward
Africa is one of the most climate-vulnerable regions in the world. Yet though climate finance has emerged as a growing solution, African banks have yet to truly ramp up their climate lending. As Carla Legros and Anthony Mbithi argue, one reason for this lack of urgency is that the financial case for this lending has rarely been framed in ways that resonate with how banks operate — namely, as a clear money-making opportunity in the near to medium term. They share a framework for understanding financial institutions' level of engagement in climate finance, providing funders and policymakers with a tool they can use to match their interventions to banks’ institutional reality.
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- Environment, Finance, Investing
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Aligning Capital with Justice: How Innovative Finance Can Enable the Final Stretch Toward Energy Access in Africa
The world has made unprecedented progress toward universal energy access, and today over 90% of the global population has electricity. But as Roeland Menger at Nithio explains, the remaining 10% live in rural and low-income communities — primarily in Africa — that typical business and funding models can't reach. He argues that the exclusion of these markets is not only ineffective but unjust, and highlights several innovative investment approaches that are expanding decentralized energy to the last mile.
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- Energy, Environment, Investing
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