NextBillion’s Most Influential Articles of 2025: Announcing the Winners of Our Annual Contest

We tallied nan votes successful NextBillion’s “Most Influential Articles of nan Year” title — an yearly contented since 2012.

The 3 winners are listed below.

Congratulations to nan winners and different contestants successful this year’s contest, whose insights person intelligibly resonated pinch our readers this past year. And convey you to everyone who voted, and everyone who publication and wrote for NextBillion successful 2025.

Best wishes for nan caller year!

First Place

Connected Power: Ensuring Africa is Not Left successful nan Dark — aliases Offline

By Ravi Suchak astatine Helios Towers

Sub-Saharan Africa has some nan highest power entree and integer connectivity gaps successful nan world. As Ravi Suchak explains, this is owed not to a deficiency of demand, but to basal infrastructure barriers: Telecom towers and mobile networks require a reliable powerfulness supply, which is often absent aliases prohibitively costly successful agrarian areas, and energy providers request accordant request to de-risk agrarian power investments.

He explores a solution that addresses some of these needs: “connected power,” a improvement attack that aligns power and telecom infrastructure by positioning telecom towers arsenic anchor customers for electrification projects.

Second Place

To Change nan World, Change Your Economics: How Degrowth Can Shrink Overconsumption successful nan Global North While Allowing nan Global South to Grow

By Matt Orsagh and Steve Rocco astatine nan Arketa Institute for Post-Growth Finance

The world system mostly operates nether a neoclassical economical structure, which emphasizes a reliance connected markets, a deference to nan backstage assemblage and a attraction connected changeless growth.

But according to Matt Orsagh and Steve Rocco, this building has a fatal flaw: It operates connected a satellite pinch finite resources and constricted places to put our waste, but assumes that economical maturation tin spell connected forever.

They reason that nan world needs a caller shape of economics that reflects our biology realities, 1 focused connected “degrowth” — an effort to equitably downscale accumulation and depletion successful nan Global North, without putting undue restrictions connected nan improvement of nan Global South.

Third Place

When AI Gets It Wrong: Lessons from a Women-Centered Design Experiment Highlight nan Need for Inclusive GPTs

By Koheun Lee at CARE’s Strive Women program

In emerging markets, women entrepreneurs proceed to look systemic barriers to financial inclusion.

And arsenic Koheun Lee explains, ChatGPT and different AI models sometimes lend to this exclusion, reinforcing societal biases that limit women’s imaginable for business maturation and semipermanent financial health.

She shares insights from CARE’s effort to build a women-centered creation GPT — and proposes immoderate applicable steps AI users tin return to mitigate bias against women erstwhile moving pinch mainstream GPTs.

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