Africa’s Responsible Gaming Symposium Pushes for Player Protection

Africa’s Responsible Gaming Symposium convened its second edition at D’Podium Event Centre in Ikeja, Lagos, on June 11, 2026. The room held regulators from three countries, operators including Bet9ja, Betway and 1xBet, and a body of legal and mental-health practitioners, all gathered under the theme “Building Accountability: Strengthening Africa’s Model for Player Protection.” The organizer, the non-governmental group Gamble Alert, framed the day around a single concession: that player protection in Africa has lagged the market’s breakneck expansion. The conversations that followed put numbers on that lag.

The continent’s gambling market generated about US$ 6.10 billion in revenue in 2023 across roughly 35 million active users, per Astute Analytica’s Africa Gambling Market forecast. The same forecast projects US$ 11.27 billion by 2032 on a 7.06% CAGR. At D’Podium on June 11, three regulators from Lagos, Oyo and Ghana described the controls already in place, while an operator panel made clear that more work is still required.

The Second TRGS Opens with a Reset

The Responsible Gaming Symposium opened its second year with a frankness the organizer had spent a year building toward. Fisayo Oke, CEO of Gamble Alert, framed the symposium as the product of a deliberate choice rather than a sudden campaign. “From the very beginning, we were intentional,” Oke said. “We wouldn’t become loud critics shouting from the sidelines. We would build structures. We would build systems to guide that vision through a 12-year strategic plan anchored in the clear ambition to become the gaming industry’s trusted player protection partners.” The agenda that followed put national regulators, state regulators, operators, lawyers and clinicians on shared panels.

“For many years, discussions about players’ protection were often treated as secondary to the growth of the industry. That era, clearly, has ended. Across the world, we have operators, regulators, investors, public health experts, and consumers demanding accountability; asking important questions about how we can ensure safer gaming tools are effective, and not merely symbolic.”

Olabimpe Akingba, Group Head of Responsible Gaming at pawaTech and a board member of the African iGaming Alliance, delivered the line at TRGS 2026 in Lagos on June 11. She was representing Peter Emolemo Kesitilwe, the African iGaming Alliance’s CEO. Her framing set the tone for the day: the industry’s growth phase and its accountability phase would no longer be treated as separate conversations.

The day’s roster ran more than 20 names deep, drawn from regulators, operators and patient advocates (the full list sits on the TRGS 2026 speaker roster and Lagos venue details). Among the regulators: Bashir Are of the Lagos State Lotteries and Gaming Authority, Olajide Boladuro of the Oyo State Gaming and Lottery Board, and Bashiru Donbine of the Gaming Commission of Ghana. The operator benches fielded Adewale Akande of Bet9ja, Jolade Adeoye of Betway Nigeria, Ewuzie Nnanna Chigozie of 1xBet Nigeria, Seyi Oni of KingMakers and Ahmed Olawale Jokotoye of Betano Nigeria. Olafadeke Akeju, managing partner at WYS Solicitors, and Dr. Temitope Okuwoga, a psychiatrist at Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital Yaba, sat on the panels that addressed the commercial and clinical sides.

The Regulatory Tools Already in Play

The most concrete work came from three regulators who each described a tool already running in their jurisdiction. Bashir Are, CEO of the Lagos State Lotteries and Gaming Authority and chairman of the Federation of State Gaming Regulators of Nigeria, anchored the session with SafePlay, the national self-exclusion portal (Nigeria’s SafePlay self-exclusion launch in August 2025). The Lagos regulator framed it as the floor, not the ceiling: “There is the need to strengthen on KYCs, we need to amplify on payment infrastructures and oversight so much that any wallet perceived to be underaged should be restricted and have no access.”

Bashiru Donbine, Deputy Commissioner for Strategy and Growth at Ghana’s Gaming Commission, walked delegates through the system Ghana had already built. The country’s gaming regulations now lean on the national biometric identity card, the Ghana Card, which is issued by the National Identification Authority and mandated for any financial transaction including gaming. Donbine tied player protection to that KYC backbone: “The gap in the system is KYC. It is another area we have to focus on because education in terms of responsible gaming alone will not be able to fully achieve the goals. But if there are subsystems that are in place to monitor underage gambling, it would help.” Linking the regulator’s database directly to the NIA removes the room for ambiguity that paper documents had allowed.

Olajide Boladuro, Director-General of the Oyo State Gaming and Lottery Board and vice-chairman of the Federation of State Gaming Regulators of Nigeria, brought a third lever to the discussion: artificial intelligence. Boladuro told the panel that AI can be harnessed to track player behaviour and detect abnormal changes. He also described how Oyo pre-vets advertisements to ensure they meet acceptable standards in the state, with people prioritised over revenue generation. Boladuro’s view on AI was self-aware: regulators must keep pace with operators’ innovation, or the protective layer falls behind the product. Each jurisdiction’s tool is built on a different mix of state capacity, national infrastructure and political will.

The comparison shows how uneven the floor still is. Lagos has built a digital self-exclusion product; Ghana has tied gaming to a national biometric identity system; Oyo is using AI to flag abnormal play patterns in real time. None of the three sits under a single cross-border authority, and several of the day’s speakers named that fragmentation as the next fight.

Operators Want a Seat, and They Got One

The day’s central pivot was the operators’ presence at the table. Bet9ja, Betway, 1xBet, KingMakers and Betano each put a senior compliance or legal lead on a panel rather than a marketing executive, a shift Gamble Alert’s CEO Fisayo Oke pointed to as evidence that the conversation had moved. Adewale Akande, Bet9ja’s Head of Legal and Chief Compliance Officer, took the most pointed swing at his own industry’s tactics. “We should be careful about the kind of messages that are being passed around by our influencers,” Akande said. “These messages must be balanced and objective. Often times, we’ve seen influencers prompting punters to play because someone won a certain large amount. Whereas in fact, that is not true. At Bet9ja, we don’t disclose our winners, even though we’ve seen some leverage on that daily to induce their customers. I think operators need to be careful, we have to ensure that the messages we put out through our influencers, brand ambassadors, are balanced, enabling the consumers to make informed decisions.” Jolade Adeoye of Betway and Ewuzie Nnanna Chigozie of 1xBet sat on adjacent panels, but it was Akande’s warning on influencer advertising that set the room’s tone.

The commercial stakes behind those admissions are visible in the market sizing (Africa gambling market size and forecast to 2032). Africa’s gambling industry generated about US$ 6.10 billion in 2023 across an active user base of 35 million, with 60% of users aged 18 to 35. Sports betting is the dominant channel, with 4 in 10 Nigerians aged 18 to 40 betting on sports regularly. Operators have every reason to be at the table: the next decade’s growth depends on the rules being written in the same room they are now sitting in.

• US$ 6.10 billion: Africa gambling market revenue in 2023, per Astute Analytica.
• US$ 11.27 billion: forecast Africa gambling market revenue by 2032.
• 35 million: active African gambling users counted in 2023.
• 60%: share of those users aged 18 to 35.
• 4 in 10: Nigerians aged 18 to 40 who bet on sports regularly, per Astute Analytica.

The Youngest Players Are the Reason This Matters

The data point that hung over every panel was not about market size. It was about age. A recent survey by the GamblePause Initiative Africa, cited at TRGS 2026, found that 57.2% of Nigerian children under 18 have placed a bet, with 60% to 80% of gambling harm in African communities witnessed or experienced by young people.

The regulators used the figure to justify the controls already in place. Are’s pitch for tightening KYC and payment-infrastructure gating reads differently against the 57.2% figure. Boladuro’s call for AI-driven behavioural monitoring was framed as a way to catch the cases where age verification has already been bypassed. The two Nigerian regulators, from different states and different political environments, both arrived at the same lever: stop the wallet before it funds the bet.

Donbine’s Ghana Card framework is the cleanest attempt to close that wallet at the registration layer. Tying every gaming transaction to a national biometric identity removes the entire category of fake-account fraud that fuels underage play. Akande’s anti-influencer stance targets the marketing side of the same problem: even a verified adult who sees a misleading “big winner” advertisement is being moved toward a bet they would not otherwise have made. The symposium’s framing put both halves of that pipeline on the same stage for the first time at a TRGS. As Boladuro put it on his panel, the player has to be put first, “because without the player, you can agree with me that there would be no regulations.”

Where the Framework Still Has to Prove Itself

Olafadeke Akeju, the managing partner at WYS Solicitors and founder of SLEC Africa, used her panel slot to argue that none of the work above is enough yet. She said current responsible gaming efforts across Africa remain insufficient for the scale of emerging risks. Her concerns ran to regulatory independence, the technological influence operators now wield and the commercial pressure that distorts both; she also pointed to fragmented regulatory systems and the difficulty of assessing affordability as major constraints on effective intervention. Akeju named three pillars for the next phase: stronger data-sharing frameworks, the integration of self-exclusion systems across operators, and a real lift in investment in treatment and support services.

The day’s loudest acknowledgements sat alongside Akeju’s caution. Speakers agreed that the talk about player protection is no longer a footnote. Gamble Alert’s stated cadence is to convene the symposium annually. The work in place is real; the gap between that work and what 35 million African gamblers and a forecast US$ 11.27 billion market require is also real. The Responsible Gaming Symposium’s third edition will be measured against what the regulators, operators and clinicians who convened at D’Podium build between now and then.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Responsible Gaming Symposium?

The Responsible Gaming Symposium is an annual stakeholder gathering organized by the non-governmental group Gamble Alert and focused on player protection in African gaming. The 2026 edition was the second.

When and where did TRGS 2026 take place?

TRGS 2026 took place on June 11, 2026 at D’Podium Event Centre in Ikeja, Lagos, Nigeria. Doors opened at 9:00 a.m. WAT; the programme ran from 10:00 a.m.

What is SafePlay and who can use it?

SafePlay is a national self-exclusion tool launched on August 6, 2025 by the Lagos State Lotteries and Gaming Authority. Players in Lagos can use it to voluntarily exclude themselves from all licensed gambling services in the state.

How large is Africa’s gambling market?

Africa’s gambling market generated about US$ 6.10 billion in 2023 with 35 million active users, and is forecast to reach US$ 11.27 billion by 2032 on a 7.06% CAGR, per Astute Analytica.

What did African regulators agree on at TRGS 2026?

The three regulatory leads at TRGS 2026 aligned on tightening KYC and payment-infrastructure gating of underage wallets, expanding self-exclusion tools, and adopting AI to track abnormal player behaviour. They did not commit to a single continental framework.