By Damilola Atiri
Africa’s gaming industry is expanding at a pace that is beginning to outstrip the regulatory systems designed to govern it. Across jurisdictions, markets are deepening, digital access is widening, and player participation is rising. Yet, regulation, fragmented, uneven, and often reactive, continues to lag behind the very ecosystem it seeks to control.
The recently concluded Africa Gaming Expo (AGE) Summit surfaced a defining reality: Africa’s gaming sector is approaching a regulatory inflexion point. The question is no longer whether governments should regulate more, but whether they can regulate smarter.
As moderator of the session on “Confronting Unlicensed Operators: Protecting African Players and Public Revenue,” I had a front-row view into one of the industry’s most pressing challenges. What stood out was not just the urgency of the issue, but the depth of insight from panellists working across regulation, enforcement, and market operations.
A central theme that emerged, echoed by Bashir Are, Chief Executive Officer, Lagos State Lotteries and Gaming Authority, was how regulation itself shapes market behaviour. Overly restrictive regulatory environments can unintentionally push operators into informal or illegal channels. In attempting to tighten control, regulators may expand the very black markets they seek to eliminate.
At the same time, the risks of under-regulation are equally stark. Evidence shared during the session pointed to markets where unlicensed activity rivals and in some cases exceeds the formal sector, often with higher exposure to problem gambling and weaker consumer protections. As highlighted by Moruntshi Kemorwale, Chief Executive Officer (Acting), Gambling Authority Botswana, some jurisdictions are already experiencing illegal markets that significantly outpace regulated ones. This is not an isolated pattern. In prior engagements across African markets, including discussions in Botswana, similar dynamics have emerged where gaps in regulatory design allow informal systems to scale faster than formal ones. This underscores a central tension: regulation must mitigate risk while sustaining a viable legal market.
As the Chief Executive Officer of African iGaming Alliance, Peter Emolemo, noted, the persistence of unlicensed operators is driven by a convergence of factors: technology, fragmented regulatory systems, and strong commercial incentives. Addressing any one of these in isolation is insufficient; the challenge is systemic.
Further reinforcing this balance, Cláudio Paulo, Deputy Director General, Instituto de Supervisão de Jogos, Angola, emphasised that while strong regulation is essential to mitigate risk, excessively high barriers to entry, whether through licensing costs or operational constraints, can discourage compliance and incentivise evasion.
Insights from the Francophone-focused session, moderated by Divine Afuba, reinforced that these markets remain largely shaped by state-controlled lottery systems now under pressure to adapt to a rapidly digitising environment. Governments are navigating a delicate balance between preserving established structures and enabling innovation in markets increasingly exposed to offshore operators.
These dynamics extend to taxation and market entry. Creating investor-friendly environments while ensuring governments capture fair value from the sector remains a persistent challenge. Poorly calibrated tax regimes or restrictive frameworks risk pushing operators further into unregulated spaces.
The discussion also pointed toward practical responses. Combating unlicensed operations cannot rest solely on regulators. It requires coordinated action across financial institutions, payment service providers, telecom operators, and licensed industry players. Disrupting the financial and technological channels that sustain illegal operators may prove more effective than enforcement alone.
What the AGE Summit ultimately revealed is that Africa does not have a regulation problem; it has a regulatory design problem. To put it simply, it is not that frameworks do not exist, but that they are often not structured to reflect how the market actually operates. Like traffic systems, the issue is not the absence of rules, but the design of the roads, signals, and enforcement mechanisms that shape behaviour. When these are misaligned, the system produces the high risks it is meant to prevent. The focus, therefore, must shift toward designing smarter, more responsive regulatory systems.
The path forward requires a shift from enforcement-heavy models to intelligence-driven systems. This means moving beyond visible crackdowns toward non-invasive monitoring mechanisms that enable regulators to identify risks in real time without constraining legitimate operators. It also calls for coordinated frameworks that support information sharing across jurisdictions as markets become more interconnected.
Perhaps the most actionable outcome from the session was the growing consensus around shared enforcement tools at a continental level. The idea of a common blacklist supported by coordinated policy and cross-border collaboration signals a shift toward collective accountability.
If there is one clear takeaway from the AGE Summit, it is this: Africa’s gaming sector is evolving faster than its regulatory playbook.
The future of gaming regulation in Africa will not be defined by how aggressively systems enforce rules, but by how intelligently they anticipate risk, coordinate across borders, and adapt to change.
The sector will grow. The real question is whether regulation will evolve fast enough to shape it or be left trying to catch up.
.Atiri, the Country Manager of Policy Vault, writes via [email protected]