Gene Grand on The Africa Gaming Opportunity: Why International Operators Are Paying Attention

Africa's gaming sector has moved past the point where it needs to argue for its own legitimacy. According to gaming industry figure Gene Grand, the continent has evolved from an emerging frontier into an established market that sustained international operator and investor interest can no longer afford to overlook.

Kenya's gross gaming revenue has likely reached around $1 billion, while Africa's total onshore gross gaming revenue is estimated at around $8 billion, with roughly half of that attributed to South Africa alone. Those figures place African gaming firmly within the range of markets that institutional investors take seriously, rather than treating as a speculative sideline.

The continent's digital infrastructure and mobile payment ecosystem are increasingly viewed by operators as a competitive advantage rather than a constraint, a reversal of how the market was framed even a few years ago. Grand pushes back on the usual framing of that infrastructure. "When people talk about Africa's mobile money infrastructure, they usually talk about it as something operators have to work around. I see it the other way. Some of the payment rails now running in Kenya and Ghana are more reliable than what operators are used to in mature markets." That reliability gap is easy to underestimate until an operator has actually tried reconciling card decline rates in a mature market against wallet approval rates in Nairobi.

Regulators Are Showing Up Where it Matters

In 2026, African gaming regulators have convened at global industry events from Lagos to London, a pattern that reflects the sector's growing integration into international industry dialogue rather than a series of isolated appearances. The iGaming AFRIKA Summit in Nairobi and the debut of the Africa Summit at iGB L!VE in London have positioned the continent as a peer in global regulatory conversations, with South African, Nigerian and pan-African stakeholders sitting on panels alongside international counterparts to discuss regional harmonisation and balanced taxation.

That shift in posture matters as much as any single policy outcome. Regulators who once might have been discussed at African-only events are now shaping conversations at the same summits where European and Asian regulatory frameworks get debated.

Tanzania Shows the Scale of What Is Coming

Tanzania's sports betting industry delivered roughly $463 million in gross winnings in 2025 and contributed more than TZS 260 billion to government coffers in the 2024/25 financial year, running almost entirely through mobile phones rather than physical betting shops. Looking further out, H2 Gambling Capital estimates the country's gross win from gambling will grow to more than $1 billion by the end of 2031, with online betting accounting for roughly $919 million of that figure, driven primarily by internet-based platforms. That trajectory, in a single mid-sized East African market, gives some indication of the scale operators are underwriting when they talk about the continent as a whole. Grand thinks that scale changes how the smaller markets should be viewed. "A billion-dollar gross win projection out of Tanzania alone should reframe how people think about the smaller African markets. These are not rounding errors next to Nigeria and South Africa. They are becoming serious markets in their own right." Operators still ranking African markets purely by current size risk missing which ones are about to move up that ranking.

The Assumption That Keeps Tripping Operators Up

Operators who approach African markets with outdated assumptions about minimal regulation consistently run into problems. Ghana is an apt example. Its regulatory framework, run by the Gaming Commission under the Gaming Act of 2006, has matured considerably since its introduction, with substantive licence application reviews, thorough fit-and-proper assessments of directors and beneficial owners, and active post-licence compliance monitoring, a picture that does not match the "difficult African market" framing still common among operators evaluating entry. Kenya and Nigeria show a similar pattern, with frameworks that have been developing for years rather than months. Grand traces most of the operators who struggle back to the same root cause. "The operators who get burned in Africa are usually the ones who did their regulatory homework on Europe and assumed the same shortcuts would work here. They will not. Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria have real frameworks now, and treating them as an afterthought is how licences get delayed or revoked." That mismatch between assumption and reality tends to surface at the worst possible moment, mid-application, rather than during early market research.

What This Means for International Operators

For international operators evaluating African expansion, the opportunity does not lie in regulatory arbitrage or in finding the market with the lightest oversight. It lies in identifying markets with clear growth trajectories and maturing institutional frameworks, and building an entry strategy that respects the specific regulatory reality of each one rather than importing assumptions wholesale from elsewhere.

Gene Grand argues that the operators who will benefit most from Africa's growth over the next several years are those treating regulatory engagement as a core part of market strategy now, rather than something to be worked out after entry.