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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.
- Categories
- Energy, Technology, Transportation
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Scaling Through Consortiums: Five Lessons We’ve Learned About Growing Impact Collectively
For impact-focused organizations, consortiums are rarely the easy path to scale. They tend to be slower, more complex and harder to manage than working with a single partner. But according to Emma Colenbrander at Spring Impact, consortiums can also produce solutions that are broader in perspective, stronger in legitimacy and more resilient in practice. She explores these benefits and shares five lessons for maximizing the impact of this sort of collaborative effort.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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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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A New Model for Rural Water Infrastructure in Kenya: Why Sustainability Lies Not in Building More, But in Maintaining Better
In Kenya’s arid and semi-arid lands, water is more than a basic need: It is a lifeline. Yet according to Cecilia Gamba at LeFil Consulting, despite billions in donor investments in water infrastructure over the past two decades, much of rural Kenya remains underserved. As she explains, one reason for this lack of progress is that rural water systems routinely collapse due to a chronic failure to fund and manage operations and maintenance. She shares learnings from a pilot program that tested an innovative market-based approach to managing rural water systems, exploring their implications for other water-focused businesses and initiatives serving rural communities.
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- WASH
- Tags
- governance, rural development, water
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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.
- Categories
- Investing
- Tags
- impact investing, MSMEs, research
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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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Building the Financial Services Stack of the Future: Why True Resilience Requires a More Holistic Approach
Over the last decade, financial inclusion has experienced unprecedented progress, as 79% of adults globally now have a financial account compared to 62% 10 years ago. But according to Payal Dalal at the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, most financial inclusion initiatives are still organized around verticals like loans, savings and insurance, and delivered through separate providers and channels, which forces customers to piece them together into a comprehensive safety net or growth path. She argues that the financial services stack of the future must address this lack of integration, delivering solutions that meet multiple financial needs simultaneously — while responding to the growing headwinds that individuals and entrepreneurs face today.
- Categories
- Finance
