Determining the effective conductivity of heterogeneous media is a central problem in different fields of physics. The medium considered here contains cylinders (inclusions) of random conductivities that are distributed at random in an embedding matrix. For random systems, widely encountered in applications, we derive an approximative analytical solution that applies to significantly denser configurations than Maxwell first-order approximations. The analytic solution is tested against accurate numerical simulations. The widely used effective medium approach is shown to be exact for symmetric conductivity distributions and quite accurate for asymmetrical cases.