NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

NextBillion’s “Most Influential Article of the Year” contest has been a yearly tradition since 2012. The contest highlights 12 of our most-read articles from the past year and gives readers the opportunity to vote for their favorites.

This year’s contest featured consistently strong analysis from a variety of guest writers and organizations, in sectors ranging from energy and agriculture to healthcare and fintech.

Here are the three winners, as selected by our readers.

First Place

AI in African Healthcare: The Good, the Bad and the RECKLESS

Artificial intelligence (AI) can have a major positive impact on the cost and quality of healthcare in emerging economies. But as AI gains traction in Africa’s healthcare market, Mark Wien at PocketPatientMD calls out an alarming trend: New AI solutions are being introduced into actual practice without the proper safeguards, standards and scrutiny. And even worse, these solutions are often being developed by non-medical professionals and technologists, who rush to roll out new tools without caution — and without acknowledging or perhaps even understanding the risks they pose to vulnerable patients and health systems. He urges Africa’s healthcare industry — including doctors themselves — to address this issue with the seriousness it deserves.

Second Place

Reshaping Africa’s Food Systems: Three Opportunities to Drive Sustainable, Inclusive and Scalable Impact

Africa’s agricultural sector is plagued by low yields, fragmented value chains and a large finance gap, and the region is home to 60% of the world’s uncultivated arable land. As Neil Wood, Oscar Garza and Hanna Dohrenbusch at Open Capital explain, these challenges have brought the sector to a critical juncture. They share three key solutions based on Open Capital’s work on 450+ agriculture and food systems projects across Africa, which have the power to help drive the future of agriculture on the continent in the decades to come.

Third Place

Under-Leveraged Best Practices for Scaling Productive Use of Energy Appliances: Part 1 — Sales Support and Market Access

Productive Use of Energy (PUE) appliances can increase revenue for low-income populations, mitigate climate change and improve global energy access. But according to Thomas Charoy at Hystra and Lucie Klarsfeld McGrath at Hystra and the Global Distributors Collective, uptake of PUE appliances remains slow, due in part to the training, market linkages and after-sales support needed for customers to get the full benefit from these complex products. They explore some common challenges and best practices in selling PUE solutions, focusing on the appliances with the most mature and promising markets: solar water pumps and solar refrigerators.

Congratulations to the authors of these winning articles — and to all the other authors featured in this year’s contest. And thank you to all our guest writers and readers: Your engagement with NextBillion makes our work possible, and we’re grateful for your ongoing support. We invite you to contact us if you’d like to discuss a potential guest article or other type of collaboration in the coming year. Best wishes for a prosperous and impactful 2025!

James Militzer is the managing editor of NextBillion, a publication of the William Davidson Institute.

Photo adapted from an image by Anna Tarazevich.