The energy access sector has a math problem. According to the latest Off-Grid Solar Market Trends Report from GOGLA and the World Bank, closing the last-mile electricity gap requires $21 billion in investment for off-grid solar alone. Yet in 2024, total investment in off-grid solar companies fell by 30%, landing at just under $300 million. Meanwhile, 685 million people remain without electricity globally, and if action isn’t taken to accelerate access, less than 4% of this population will be electrified by 2030. The typical response to this gap is familiar and understandable: Calls for more money, more concessional finance, more government support, more private capital. But given the size of the problem, these calls alone are not enough. It’s clear that a new approach is needed, and buried in the history of the energy access sector is a model that could provide it: open source. In the open source model, energy access innovators choose to share their work freely rather than protecting it. But though open source approaches can multiply the impact of every dollar already committed, most funders and investors have yet to take this model seriously. The Multiplication Effect At the EnAccess Foundation, where I serve as Managing...

Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGo) solar has done something remarkable. It brought light and power to millions of rural households that the grid never reached, and it showed that these customers will use the installment payment model to purchase assets that improve their lives. But it’s now confronting a challenge that puts this accomplishment — and the financial health and viability of both PAYGo businesses and their customers — at risk. I have worked in this sector for most of its history, as an entrepreneur and later as an adviser. I believe PAYGo faces a credit problem that affects customers, and holds back companies and funders. The good news is that the problem has a clear root cause, and that cause can be fixed. What PAYGo achieved, and what went wrong The idea behind PAYGo is simple. A customer gets a solar home system and pays for it in small installments. If payments stop, the system switches off, like prepaid energy. Off-grid solar has grown fast. According to the 2025 market report from GOGLA, the global association for the off-grid solar energy industry, “GOGLA affiliate companies are now serving over 148 million people with solar energy kits.” Though most of these are small...

Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGo) solar has done something remarkable. It brought light and power to millions of rural households that the grid never reached, and it showed that these customers will use the installment payment model to purchase assets that improve their lives. But it’s now confronting a challenge that puts this accomplishment — and the financial health and viability of both PAYGo businesses and their customers — at risk. I have worked in this sector for most of its history, as an entrepreneur and later as an adviser. I believe PAYGo faces a credit problem that affects customers, and holds back companies and funders. The good news is that the problem has a clear root cause, and that cause can be fixed. What PAYGo achieved, and what went wrong The idea behind PAYGo is simple. A customer gets a solar home system and pays for it in small installments. If payments stop, the system switches off, like prepaid energy. Off-grid solar has grown fast. According to the 2025 market report from GOGLA, the global association for the off-grid solar energy industry, “GOGLA affiliate companies are now serving over 148 million people with solar energy kits.” Though most of these are small...

What is the biggest story in financial inclusion in 2026? We at e-MFP recently published the “Financial Inclusion Compass 2026,” a mixed-methods survey of sector trends, perceptions, risks and priorities that we’ve published regularly since 2018, and the results reveal a few plausible answers to this question. Climate adaptation is still the highest-ranked trend. Artificial intelligence (AI), something respondents greeted largely with indifference only two years ago, has risen to second place as a trend, and the risks of AI and data misuse are now seen as an immensely important challenge. Changing capital flows are another challenge that’s firmly on the agenda, as public and donor funding becomes less predictable. And respondents continue to worry about the difficulty of sustainably reaching populations that remain excluded. But looking at these trend and challenge rankings alone (while important and interesting) risks missing the full picture. The clearest signals from the 2026 Compass come from looking at these issues in the aggregate, examining how they intersect. As this year’s (and previous years’) survey responses have illustrated, many in the sector are raising their ambitions for what financial inclusion has to achieve, at the same time as the environment in which they operate is...

I have spent the last six years sitting across the table from both sides of the same familiar equation. On one side are institutional investors with genuine intent to deploy capital into emerging markets. On the other side are entrepreneurs and operators in West Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America who are building fast-growing businesses but struggling to access the funding they need. The capital exists, but the gap persists. In my experience leading Top Tier Impact, the reason for this gap is almost never risk appetite or return expectations. And it’s not due to the much-discussed “lack of an investable pipeline.” The Myth of the Deal Flow Problem According to many funders, a common reason why impact capital does not reach low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) fast enough is that there is a lack of investable deal flow. Yet the pipeline of investable businesses exists. What I see missing is the connective tissue: networks of trusted, embedded practitioners who can surface credible opportunities, do meaningful due diligence, and bridge the enormous information asymmetry between a capital allocator in London or Singapore and a founder in Dakar or Nairobi. This asymmetry is not just financial. It is mostly relational, cultural...

Climate Startup Tivano Secures $606,000 to Turn Namibia’s Invasive Bush into Carbon Credits  NextBillion

The impact sector has proven that business can do good. But how can it make those impacts last: designing ownership, governance and capital to sustain the mission even when founders leave, companies are sold or markets shift? And how can it address the polycrisis that is putting communities, ecosystems and business models at increasing risk around the world? Those are some of the questions at the heart of a new book, “The Impact Entrepreneur Breakthrough: A Field Manual for the Regenerative Economy,” by Laurie Lane-Zucker, the founder and CEO of Impact Entrepreneur, a global media platform and network with more than 70,000 members in over 200 countries. In the interview below, he shares guidance from the book — and from his decades of work as a pioneering voice in the impact space — on how the sector can navigate the growing complexity of the global challenges it faces today. 1. After 15 years of running Impact Entrepreneur — on top of a noteworthy career working for social change — what made you decide to write this book, at this historical moment? What do you hope the book will accomplish? Two things came together, one in the world and one in...

For the past five years, Cambodia’s microfinance sector has been experiencing a major crisis. Over-indebted borrowers have been selling land, taking children out of school, and in some cases taking their own lives. Sadly, this was a crisis foretold. In July 2016, Cambodia’s microfinance industry convened an all-day event: “Let’s Talk about Over-indebtedness, Now!”. The microfinance CEOs and investors in attendance heard presentations from multiple analysts, including economists from the International Monetary Fund, all of whom conveyed the same message: The sector’s growth had to slow. That same month, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank’s private investment arm, arranged a $90 million loan and gave its “Stamp of Approval” to PRASAC, the largest and fastest-growing of Cambodia’s leading microfinance institutions (MFIs). After a decade of escalating growth across the sector — along with escalating cases of over-indebtedness, as documented by Cambodian civil-society groups and international human-rights organizations — IFC’s watchdog, the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO) published its own findings in June 2026. Its two-year investigation concluded that not only had clients been harmed, but that this harm was related to IFC’s failure to identify and monitor the social risks created by its investments. In its response, IFC’s Board...

If philanthropic capital is waiting for a rainy day to address climate change, it’s already pouring. But instead of supporting solutions to this fundamental global challenge, a significant source of funding is either lying dormant or, worse, actively contributing to the problem. I’m referring to Donor-Advised Funds (DAFs), a type of specialized charitable giving account that lets someone donate cash or assets, take an immediate tax deduction, and direct that money to nonprofits as individual grants over time. These funds are popular with the general public: To take one prominent example, around 48% of Fidelity Charitable DAF accounts had less than $25,000 in assets at the end of 2025. They’re also popular with wealthy families and other high net-worth individuals, who favor them due to their tax advantages and the greater simplicity they provide compared to alternative philanthropic approaches, like setting up a foundation. And they are growing: As of FY 2024 (the most recent data year), more than $327 billion was sitting in U.S. DAFs, earmarked for the public good. The money has, from a legal and tax perspective, already been gifted to a charitable entity (the DAF), and the donors have already enjoyed the tax benefits of making...

In March of 2025, the ICRIER Agri-PV team went to Rajasthan to explore the possibility of running an agriphotovoltaics (Agri-PV) pilot in the Indian state. The Agri-PV model, which we wrote about in a NextBillion article earlier this year, allows farmers to grow crops and generate solar power on the same land, by elevating the ground-mounted PV panels to make space to cultivate the land underneath. Though we later implemented this pilot in both Rajasthan and Odisha, at the time it was a little more than a hypothesis, and testing it meant finding a farmer who was willing to bet on an idea that existed mainly on paper (at least in the Indian context). Laying the groundwork for these pilots was a slow, iterative process involving one site visit after another, conversations with power distribution companies (DISCOMs) to understand their concerns, and discussions with farmers who were interested in the additional income but understandably cautious about the risks. DISCOMS are one of the key stakeholders in such projects, as they are the entity that buys the energy generated by the Agri-PV plant. Somewhere along the way, during this process of testing, questioning and recalibrating our approach, we met Kajod Mal,...

The modern concept of international development emerged from the ashes of World War II, taking shape as colonial empires collapsed and newly independent nations arose across Asia and Africa. Two then-small entities, one in the US and the other in the UK, were tasked with reshaping the globe. One was the World Bank, which opened in 1946 on a single office floor in Washington, D.C., with just 26 people. The other was the United Nations, which established its initial operational footing that same year in a temporary office in London with seconded diplomats and clerks. From those modest beginnings, the development sector has grown over the subsequent decades into a sprawling ecosystem, including both powerful multilaterals and millions of community-level NGOs worldwide. But this journey is not just a story of expanding budgets and staff headcounts. It is also the story of how the sector has repeatedly reinvented its tools and techniques to handle the growing scale, depth and relevance of development work. Today, as traditional aid recedes and legacy tools strain under modern operational demands, the sector has reached another defining inflection point. While the emergence of advanced technologies like AI offers unprecedented processing power, leveraging them requires more...

Exits make the wheel of impact investing go around. And right now that wheel is not turning, particularly in smallholder agriculture in Africa. Exits offer companies the opportunity to grow and sustain their operations, while also allowing investors to recycle returned capital into other impactful solutions. Without them, companies will be locked into a permanent, fruitless search for affordable capital, and impact investors might as well just give grants. This is why the stark lack of equity exits to date in smallholder agriculture should compel impact investors to take action. According to Africa: The Big Deal – Startup Deals Database, a database listing funding deals secured by startups in Africa, since 2019, there were 208 equity exits across the continent. And while agriculture made up 10% of investment flow (436 out of 4,173 deals), it accounted for just 3% of exits (seven out of 208). To put it another way, for every 62 announced ag deals, there has been one ag exit. In comparison, the energy and water sector saw one exit for every 33 deals, while fintech saw one exit for every 16 deals. The chart below shows the ratio of exit to deals for each sector, expressed as...

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In 2013, I co-founded Light of Hope, an education company that runs an after-school programme for children aged 4-12 in Bangladesh. We built creativity workshops, moral education curricula and learning experiences for children who struggled in a rote-learning school system. The programmes worked reasonably well, but we kept hitting the same wall: Children arrived at age 4 already behind, not academically but developmentally. They lacked the curiosity, the emotional vocabulary, and the basic capacity to handle frustration and keep trying. As the Harvard Center on the Developing Child explains, these foundations are built through the everyday “serve and return” interactions between a child and their caregivers in the first years of life. By the time a child reached us, that critical early window had largely passed. That realisation made us rethink everything. My co-founders and I saw that, if we wanted children to arrive at school ready to learn, we had to reach them earlier, which meant supporting their parents from the time of the child’s birth. To help meet that need, in 2016 we founded ToguMogu, an AI-powered digital parenting platform in Bangladesh that has reached more than 476,000 registered users over the past six years, at parenting stages...

In most of the international development and social impact organisations I work with as a strategic AI advisor, the actual use cases of artificial intelligence are not normally based on formal policies or other top-down guidance. Rather, AI is more commonly used via ad hoc workarounds, a practice sometimes termed “shadow AI use.” Staff are regularly using free, publicly available AI tools to summarise evaluation reports, translate documents, draft proposals, tidy up their field notes and prepare donor updates. Some do this carefully. Others do it with little sense of how outputs should be checked, where their own human judgement must be used, and what types of training data should never be uploaded. Leadership responses to this off-the-books AI use vary. Some leaders I’ve worked with know it is happening and look away. Some suspect it and hope the question resolves itself, or may even embrace staff experimentation with AI tools in the absence of an organisational policy. A few others have restricted or banned staff use of AI tools. That last response deserves attention. In a sector rightly alert to technology’s risks, restricting or even banning staff use of AI tools may feel like the responsible position for many...

Rising rates of financial fraud in emerging economies threaten to undermine the promise of digitization and the economic gains it unlocks. But for women entrepreneurs, digital tools are vital to the survival of their businesses. Without them, they face fewer markets and limited access to formal financial institutions, which translates into fewer sales and less growth. Yet navigating these ever-changing threats requires them to run a constant risk calculation every time they accept an online order or make a digital payment. So how big an impact is this challenge having on women entrepreneurs, and what can be done to address it? We already know that fraud is among the well-documented barriers women face when accessing digital financial tools and services. What’s missing is data on the unique risks women experience once they have already gained access to formal financial services or adopted digital tools — particularly in terms of their exposure and response to digital financial fraud, and their ability to recover from it. Both CARE and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) have recently collected more data on this issue, via the Midline Survey from Strive Women, a Mastercard Strive program implemented by CARE, and from IPA’s Financial Consumer Protection...

Multilateral development banks (MDBs) have spent the last decade building the foundations of digital economies across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), by financing broadband networks, data centers, digital ID systems and regulatory frameworks. This work can help to make large-scale AI deployment in these markets a viable investment opportunity. But laying the groundwork alone will not deliver transformation. As AI moves from a research frontier to a practical tool for governments and service providers across the Global South, MDBs are confronted with a harder challenge: What will it take to actually deploy AI at scale in LMICs, and are they set up to finance that? Investing in components rather than systems The AI investment landscape within MDBs today is wide but thin. There are pilots, such as an AI tool for tax administration in Armenia, responsible AI experiments with municipalities in Chile, and innovation challenges for road safety in Asia. There is infrastructure, such as data centers in Thailand and Azerbaijan, broadband expansion across West Africa, and digital identity programs in the Philippines. There are enabling environments, such as cybersecurity support across dozens of countries, regulatory sandboxes, and AI policy advisory. Each of these initiatives is valuable, and they span...

There is intense pressure to reach universal electrification by 2030, which requires a further 666 million people to be electrified — most of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa. However, at the current rate of progress, the world will not achieve that goal. The solution is often framed as hinging upon mini-grids, which many view as a key pathway toward universal energy access. With some estimating that mini-grids will need to account for 40% of all installed capacity, there is growing pressure on the private sector to step up and make the necessary investments in this technology. Mini-grids are also an attractive energy access option for policymakers, as they can ultimately be connected to the state utility to provide a national grid, which is seen as the gold standard for electrification. But this focus on mini-grids may be distracting policymakers in both the public and development sectors from faster, more cost-effective solutions, resulting in misallocated resources and slower progress. Below, I’ll explore why mini-grids — despite being a good solution in some areas — have a number of under-reported constraints, and why emerging alternative solutions may present a more realistic path toward universal energy access. For the purposes of this article,...

Authors: Douglas P. Daura & Nihar Jangle, GIZ.On March 12th, e-MFP was pleased to launch the European Microfinance Award (EMA) 2025 on ‘Building Resilience through Inclusive Insurance’. This is the 16...

November 12, 2025 (Punjab Khabarnama Bureau)  :  Groww, the Bengaluru-based online investment platform, made a spectacular debut on Dalal Street as its shares rallied up to 11% above the issue price during intraday trading on Wednesday. The company, listed under its parent Nextbillion Technology Ltd, saw a strong response from investors amid high enthusiasm for India’s fast-growing fintech sector.