Africa’s online betting industry has quietly become one of the fastest-growing gambling markets in the world – and one of the least prepared from a regulatory standpoint. Recent estimates suggest the continent’s online gambling market is worth around 1.6 billion dollars in 2024 and could more than double by 2028, growing at roughly 10–12% per year.
Three markets illustrate both the opportunity and the risk: South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya.
In South Africa, total gambling turnover has climbed into the region of 1.5 trillion rand in the 2024/25 financial year, up from about 1.1 trillion just a year earlier. Gross gambling revenue is approaching 75 billion rand, with betting – including online – generating roughly 70% of that total. Yet this surge is still governed by a National Gambling Act written in 2004, long before smartphones, live betting and mobile wallets reshaped player behaviour. Regulators are trying to retrofit a 20-year-old framework to an ecosystem that moves at app-store speed.
Nigeria is even more striking. Around 60 million Nigerians are believed to participate in gambling, with the online segment alone projected to reach 500 million dollars in 2025 after growing from roughly 400 million in 2023. Some estimates place the broader sports-betting industry above 2 billion dollars when land-based and informal channels are included. At the same time, problem gambling is rising in a country where more than a third of the population lives in extreme poverty, and a daily bet of 5 dollars can mean the difference between food and rent.
Kenya shows how fast mobile betting can reshape a society. Surveys indicate that more than 80% of respondents there have placed a bet, one of the highest rates on the continent. In 2023 Kenyans wagered, on average, the equivalent of more than 1.5 million dollars per day, with mobile money as the default payment rail. Government crackdowns in 2019 briefly slowed growth, but the market is rebounding as tax receipts climb again, creating a political dependence on betting revenue that mirrors players’ own dependencies.
Across Africa, more than 90% of bets are now placed by phone, and mobile-money accounts have surpassed one billion. Regulation, however, remains fragmented, under-resourced and largely reactive. In many countries, online betting is still treated as a small extension of old lottery or casino rules rather than as a data-rich, always-on financial service.
The real risk is not the growth itself, but the governance gap. Without harmonised standards on customer checks, affordability controls, advertising rules, data sharing and cross-border enforcement, Africa’s betting boom can quickly turn into a social and political liability. The continent does not need to kill the golden goose – but it urgently needs to build a proper fence around it.
