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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
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- 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.
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- Investing
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- 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.
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- Finance
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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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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
