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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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Analysis: The Hidden Kenyan Workers Training China’s AI Models
An unemployment crisis has created fertile ground for companies to step in with opaque systems built on WhatsApp groups, middlemen, and bargain-basement wages.
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- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Analysis: Big Bets and Broken Unicorns: Tiger Global’s Rise and Reckoning
The fast-money pandemic era helped build billion-dollar startups around the world — then brought many down just as quickly. Will the AI boom be a repeat?
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- Investing
- Region
- Global
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Uber Eats Alum Lands $14 Million Seed from a16z to Fix WhatsApp Chaos for Latin America’s Doctors
Solving the WhatsApp communication challenge in Latin America is critical because, according to Merin, patients in Latin America often choose their doctors based on their willingness to communicate using this channel.
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- Health Care, Investing, Telecommunications
- Region
- Latin America
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Analysis: South Asian SMEs Face Digital Turning Point as AI Adoption Accelerates
While artificial intelligence (AI) has already begun reshaping large corporations in the region, most SMEs remain trapped in traditional, low-efficiency business models that limit scalability and financial resilience.
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- Finance, Technology
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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Viewpoint: Babyl Paradox: When Evidence-Based Digital Success Cannot Beat Corporate Failure
A platform delivering superior healthcare outcomes became another cautionary tale of corporate failure.
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- Health Care, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Microsoft Investing $17.5 Billion in India for AI and Cloud Infrastructure
The announcement underscores the growing global competition among major technology companies to expand in India, which has become one of the world’s fastest-growing digital markets.
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- Investing, Technology
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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Finland and EU Launch €2 Billion Digitalisation Programme Across Emerging Markets
The programme is part of the EU’s Global Gateway strategy, which aims to strengthen sustainable connectivity with partner countries and marks the EU’s largest guarantee initiative for the digital sector to date.
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- Investing, Technology
- Region
- Global
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