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NextBillion’s Most Influential Articles of 2023: Announcing the Three Winners of our Annual Contest
As 2024 gets underway, we'd like to announce the results of NextBillion’s annual “Most Influential Article of the Year” contest. This year's contest featured a strong slate of articles, covering a diverse array of topics ranging from systems change to decarbonization, in sectors that included energy, agriculture, finance and more. We've highlighted the three winners, as selected by our readers, in this article.
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- Agriculture, Energy, Environment, Finance, Investing, Social Enterprise, Technology, WASH
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Announcing NextBillion’s Most Influential Articles of 2023: Cast Your Vote in our Annual Contest by Jan. 7!
As 2023 draws to a close, it’s time for NextBillion’s annual tradition: our “Most Influential Articles of the Year” contest. As we've done since 2012, we've selected 12 of our most-read articles from the past year, inviting readers to vote for the ones that influenced their thinking the most. You can vote multiple times — up to once per hour — during the voting period, which will run from Dec. 22 to 11:59 pm on Jan. 7. Best wishes for a healthy and prosperous new year!
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- Agriculture, Energy, Environment, Finance, Investing, Social Enterprise, Technology, WASH
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The Graduation Approach isn’t Just for Extreme Poverty: An Innovative Project Leverages it to Rebuild Livelihoods After Forced Relocation
The Graduation Approach is a proven way to sustainably build the livelihoods of people living in extreme poverty. But as Anton Simanowitz at Social Performance Solutions explains, it is also being leveraged in contexts that go beyond poverty alleviation. He discusses one such application, exploring a pilot program that used the Graduation Approach to rebuild livelihoods in a community that experienced forced relocation due to mining activities.
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- Energy, Environment
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PUE at the BoP: Three Approaches To Making Productive Uses Of Energy Accessible To All
Productive Use of Energy (PUE) technologies, such as solar water pumps, refrigeration and sewing machines, are crucial for helping smallholder farmers and other microentrepreneurs generate incomes. But as Christopher Emmott at Acumen explains, the high up-front costs of PUE appliances prevent many people at the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) from purchasing them. He shares some innovative approaches and business models that can enable vulnerable communities to access these life-changing technologies.
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- Agriculture, Energy, Social Enterprise, Technology
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A Hidden Risk — And Opportunity — in Clean Energy: Why the Energy Transition Cannot Happen Unless it Addresses Women’s Unpaid Care Work
In advance of the first-ever International Day of Care and Support, Kate Grantham at FemDev Consulting and Carolina Robino and Flaubert Mbiekop at the International Development Research Centre highlight the interconnections between unpaid care work and the global transition to clean energy. They argue that this transition will falter unless it addresses women's heavy and unequal responsibility for unpaid care work — reducing women’s clean energy contributions, and possibly reinforcing existing gender inequalities in the process.
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- Energy, Social Enterprise
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Agricultural Insurance + Energy Access: An Innovative Pilot Program Reveals the Value of Bundled Services — And the Need for Cross-Sector Partnerships
As the world works to achieve SDG7, it's becoming clear that cross-sector partnerships will be key to meeting its goal of affordable, sustainable energy for all by 2030. Anshul Patel at Bboxx — a leading distributor of pay-as-you-go solar energy products — shares learnings from the company's recent partnership with Pula, an agri-insurance technology firm, which insured Bboxx customers against the climate-related crop failures that can lead to payment defaults and repossession of their energy products.
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- Agriculture, Energy, Finance, Technology
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What’s the Most Efficient Way to Deploy Mini-Grid Distribution Infrastructure?: A Study Assesses Different Approaches — And Finds a Clear Winner
Mini-grids have emerged as a viable technology to accelerate energy access in sub-Saharan Africa, but if they hope to become commercially sustainable, their profitability and distribution infrastructure must improve. Tombo Banda, Charles Sweetland and Faisal Olanipekun at CrossBoundary share the preliminary results of a Mini-Grid Innovation Lab study that explores the most efficient ways to deploy a distribution grid, highlighting the benefits and challenges of different approaches.
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- Energy, Technology
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The Overlapping Impacts of Off-Grid Solar: Four Ways Innovative Funding Can Enable the Sector to Advance Global Climate and Poverty Goals
How can the off-grid solar sector achieve its energy access and climate-related goals? Laura Fortes and Drew Corbyn at GOGLA argue that there’s one clear answer to that question: more and better finance. They discuss four ways innovative funding models can enable the sector to rapidly and radically accelerate progress toward universal energy access and other development goals.
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- Energy, Environment, Investing, Technology
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