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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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IFC Study Shows Emerging Market Infrastructure Returns Beat S&P 500
Standard Bank boss Sim Tshabalala has led the chorus calling for relaxed regulations in financing infrastructure.
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- Finance, Investing, Technology
- Region
- Global
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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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African Development Bank Secures $11 Billion in Historic Fund
The African Development Bank’s concessional financing arm mobilised a record $11 billion from 43 Partners in its 17th (ADF-17), an amount the multilateral lender said signals confidence in the continent’s development prospects.
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- Finance
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Global Heat Wave Days Jump to 19.3 a Year: Women in Low- and Middle-Income Nations at High Risk
A review conducted by researchers from The George Institute for Global Health and Imperial College London has found that most heat adaptation efforts in LMICs continue to focus on infrastructure and climate mitigation, with limited attention to health outcomes and significant gaps in gender inclusion.
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- Environment, Health Care
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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African Development Bank Backs Hyphen with $10 Million Green Hydrogen Project in Namibia
The Sustainable Energy Fund for Africa (SEFA) will provide the loan to support front-end engineering design studies for solar and wind generation, battery energy storage systems, electrolyser capacity and desalination infrastructure.
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- Energy, Environment
- 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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