Africa Must Address Gambling Harm Before It Becomes Entrenched

This week’s feature by Iyke Bede is a collaborative effort between GAMINGWEEK and Gamble Aware NG through its Safer Gaming for Africa newsletter, highlighting conversations and insights shaping responsible gambling and player protection across the continent.

As gambling becomes increasingly embedded in everyday digital life across Africa, the industry faces a growing challenge: gambling may be becoming easier to recognise as entertainment, but harder to recognise when it becomes harmful.

In more established gambling markets, operators and regulators have developed systems designed to identify behavioural signals associated with gambling harm before they escalate into more serious problems. African markets, at this stage in their trajectory, remain largely reactionary.

Michael Zhang, a gambling psychologist and the founder and CEO of Incremental, strongly advises against allowing this approach to become the norm.

“I’d be careful about waiting for gambling disorder rates or treatment numbers to tell us there’s a problem,” Zhang stated. “Those are important measures, but they’re also relatively late measures. By the time someone appears in a treatment service, a lot may already have happened.”

The challenge is partly rooted in how gambling itself has changed. In the past, land-based entry points came with the friction of physically travelling and making the deliberate effort to place a bet. In today’s digital world, that friction has eroded. At the same time, widely publicised winnings have reduced some of the inhibition around gambling. For many, gambling is increasingly seen as a potential source of income.

Financial pressures, financial illiteracy and poor financial decisions can further change how people perceive gambling. A wager begins to look like an additional stream of income, and with every win or loss, the behaviour can become reinforced.

The constant bombardment of gambling marketing has also helped shift its place in everyday life. Betting is now woven into sport, entertainment and increasingly, the digital spaces people occupy every day.

Zhang believes this changing perception can make harmful gambling harder to recognise, particularly as newer forms of wagering blur the distinction between gambling, analysis and investment.

“Prediction markets blur those boundaries because almost anything in the news can become something to bet on: an election, an interest rate decision, an awards show. The same information you were already consuming becomes something you can put money behind,” Zhang said.

He added, “That changes the story someone can tell themselves about what they’re doing. If I spend hours researching an election, studying polling data and then putting money behind my prediction, I may not experience myself in the same way as someone placing a bet on a football game. It can feel more like analysis, investing, or being rewarded for knowing something other people don’t.”

This ambiguity, he said, can create a false sense of control. A punter may believe that knowledge and analysis can determine when to bet and when to stop, only to encounter an unpredictable outcome.

“But being good at predicting something isn’t necessarily the same as being good at betting on it. And people can confuse those two abilities,” Zhang noted.

The problem can become particularly difficult when intelligence and analytical ability are used to rationalise continued losses.

“I’ve worked with people who were incredibly intelligent, analytical and successful in other areas of their lives. Sometimes those strengths protected them,” Zhang explained. “But sometimes those same strengths became part of what kept the gambling going because every loss could be explained away: the analysis was right but something unexpected happened, the market mispriced the event, they entered at the wrong time, or they just needed better information next time. That’s why prediction markets present an interesting psychological challenge.”

Zhang’s work in gambling psychology began at the Gambling Treatment and Research Clinic at the University of Sydney, where he interacted with people whose lives had been profoundly affected by gambling. He said the experience changed his understanding of the problem.

“People would come in because they were losing money, but the longer you worked with them, the less the problem seemed to be only about money. Gambling could be an escape. It could create hope. It could change how someone felt about themselves for a few hours. For some people, it represented this imagined pathway from the life they had to the life they thought they could have.

“That made me increasingly interested in what we actually mean by recovery. Of course stopping gambling matters. But if gambling has occupied a psychological, emotional or social role in someone’s life, removing the behavior leaves another question behind: what replaces it? What are they recovering toward?” said Zhang.

That question is particularly relevant to young adults experiencing greater independence and trying to establish their place in society. Gambling can offer excitement, social connection and the possibility of making money. Its instant outcomes can create what Zhang calls “compressed possibility”, where the prospect of achieving a desired outcome is suddenly compressed from years of hard work into a matter of hours.

For an unemployed or underemployed person, or someone facing financial difficulties, gambling may therefore not necessarily be approached as entertainment. It can start to look like a plausible way to get somewhere in life. Asking such a person to quit gambling may not be well received because gambling has become a source of hope rather than entertainment. The more realistic question becomes: “What future are we helping this person build?”

For African markets, Zhang believes attention should shift from measuring established gambling problems to identifying the trajectory towards harm. This means paying attention to the rate of impulsive gambling, the frequency of gambling prompts across media platforms, and abnormal or clandestine gambling that interrupts normal daily routines.

Payment solutions also play an important role.

“In markets where betting and mobile payments are closely connected, the distance between wanting to gamble and being able to gamble can become incredibly small,” Zhang noted. “Psychologically, even a little friction may create time for a different decision to occur.”

African markets are not entirely docile in responsible gaming. Several markets have introduced tools to help punters curtail irresponsible play.

But there are limitations. In Nigeria, for example, operators tailor these tools differently, in line with regulatory expectations, with functions specific to each operator. Once a punter leaves, other operators are eager to take them on.

Zhang said the effectiveness of responsible gambling tools should also be viewed with caution.

He said, “The first thing to say is that the evidence is more mixed than people sometimes assume. Different tools have been studied in different ways, under different conditions, and measures that look similar on paper can operate very differently in practice.

“There are responsible gambling tools that appear useful, particularly self-exclusion and forms of pre-commitment or financial limit-setting, but their effectiveness depends enormously on how they’re designed. A voluntary limit that someone can easily increase in the middle of a gambling session is psychologically very different from a limit that was set in advance and is difficult to reverse.

“Most responsible gambling tools are designed to prevent or reduce harm while someone is still gambling. Once someone is repeatedly trying and failing to control their gambling, experiencing significant financial or relationship consequences, or desperately wanting to stop, another reminder about responsible play may not be what they need.”

This raises another question: when these tools detect unusual playing patterns in a punter’s behaviour, who becomes responsible for acting on that information?

Zhang sees this as a growing psychological challenge, given the widening gap between how well gambling platforms understand their customers and how well customers understand their own behaviour.

As platforms become better at detecting risk, he argues, the question is no longer simply whether they can identify a problem, but when that knowledge creates an obligation to act.

For African markets, Zhang cautions against simply copying the policies of more established gambling markets, noting that regulatory, cultural and payment environments differ. The bigger lesson, he says, is to address systemic problems early, particularly the tension between commercial incentives and player protection. When a customer showing signs of losing control also becomes increasingly valuable to an operator, commercial and harm signals can point in opposite directions.