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Nigeria’s Paystack Moves Into Lending as It Acquires Ladder Microfinance Bank
Despite the number of players in Nigeria’s lending market, there’s still a substantial credit gap for small businesses estimated at around ₦13 trillion in unmet financing.
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Gates Foundation to End Financial Inclusion Support in 2030
Transition to purely commercial funding for initiatives will not be ‘quick or simple.’
- Categories
- Finance
- 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.
- Categories
- Energy, Environment, Finance, Investing, Technology, Telecommunications, Transportation
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Moniepoint MFB Launches All-in-One Moniebook Platform to Empower MSMEs in Nigeria
The tool enables business owners to manage inventory, track sales, process payments, monitor staff roles, manage customer relationships, and generate real-time reports from one system.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- digital payments, fintech, microfinance, MSMEs, scale
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Financing Off-Grid Solar: A Pioneering Provider in Honduras Shows the Impact of Diversified Funding
Honduras is one of the poorest countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, and many of its most remote regions remain unserved by the electricity grid. Richenda Van Leeuwen at Hummingbird Green Solutions and Richard Stuebi and Jesse Colman at Boston University explore how Soluz Honduras is bringing freezers and other solar products to these markets by leveraging a variety of different financing models — an approach that shows how diversified funding can enable businesses to serve even the hardest-to-reach areas and the poorest of customers.
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RADIANT YACU of Rwanda Wins European Microfinance Award 2025
"RADIANT YACU’s model bundles affordable hospital cash and funeral cover with microfinance services, leveraging group structures to make enrolment simple and premiums sustainable."
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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BII and BlueOrchard Launch $250 Million Climate Fund for Insurers
The fund will primarily provide senior loans to banks, microfinance providers and other intermediaries offering climate finance to small and medium-sized enterprises in emerging markets.
- Categories
- Environment, Finance
- Region
- Global
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Global Partnerships Announces Maturity of 6th Impact Investment Fund
The 10-year Social Investment Fund 6.0 demonstrated the power of impact-first investing strategies for addressing poverty in Africa and Latin America
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
- Region
- Global
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