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Sports Betting Integrity in Africa: A Practical Guide to the Data, the Debate, and the Way Forward

By jili tutorial · September 27, 2026

Sports Betting Integrity in Africa: A Practical Guide to the Data, the Debate, and the Way Forward

Introduction: A Continent at a Tipping Point

The International Betting Integrity Association (IBIA) has been watching Africa’s betting market closely. Its conclusion is both reassuring and bracing: the underlying drivers of betting-related match-fixing in Africa are not unique. Criminals look for the same weaknesses everywhere—poor governance, financial vulnerability, limited integrity education, and inadequate reporting mechanisms. What makes Africa different is not the problem, but the setting: a market growing at remarkable speed, with widely varying levels of regulatory maturity from one jurisdiction to another.

That combination creates both risk and opportunity. A betting market that is expanding quickly can outgrow the safeguards around it. But a market that is still being built can also embed integrity into its foundations from the start. The question is whether African regulators, sports bodies, and licensed operators can make that happen.

This guide unpacks the key findings and arguments from IBIA’s 2025 Sports Betting Integrity Report, with context on how alerts work, what they do and do not mean, and what a strong integrity framework should look like.

The Scale of Africa’s Betting Boom

IBIA’s 2025 Sports Betting Integrity Report includes projections from the analytics firm H2 Gambling Capital. Those projections are striking:

Gross gambling revenue measures the amount retained by operators after paying out winnings, rather than the total amount staked. The jump from $3.5 billion to $19.4 billion is therefore not just a story about more people betting. It is a story about a much larger, more commercial, and more digital African betting economy.

For IBIA’s chief executive, Khalid Ali, this trajectory is not simply a risk to be managed. “That growth presents an opportunity as much as a challenge,” he says. “Digital, account-based betting generates valuable intelligence that licensed operators can use to identify suspicious activity before it escalates.”

In other words, the same technology that makes modern betting so attractive to consumers also leaves a data trail. When betting happens through regulated, account-based operators, every transaction is recorded. That creates a powerful early-warning system for match-fixing and other integrity threats.

Why Africa’s Regulatory Fragmentation Matters

Africa is not one betting market. It is dozens of different markets, each with its own laws, licensing regimes, enforcement capacities, and sporting structures. Some countries have developed relatively mature regulatory systems. Others have little or no formal oversight.

This fragmentation matters for integrity because suspicious betting activity rarely respects national borders. A match in one country can attract bets from customers in another country, and those bets can pass through operators licensed in a third jurisdiction. If one African country has strong monitoring but its neighbour does not, the weak link becomes an attractive target for criminals.

Ali and IBIA have long argued that integrity threats cannot be solved at the national level alone. The response has to combine global monitoring with local partnerships. That is why IBIA works with operators across multiple jurisdictions and with sports and regulatory bodies in Africa and beyond.

How to Read IBIA’s Alert Data

The Raw Numbers

IBIA’s report records alerts relating to sporting events in Africa. The headline figures are:

At first glance, a rise in alerts might look like evidence that match-fixing is getting worse. Ali warns against that conclusion. “It is impossible, and potentially misleading, to conclude that more alerts automatically mean more match-fixing,” he says.

The 17 alerts in the first half of 2026, he adds, are “reasonably consistent” with the rate recorded in 2025 rather than a sudden escalation.

Why More Alerts Can Be a Sign of Improvement

The total number of alerts depends on several forces, many of which have nothing to do with the true prevalence of corruption.

This leads to a core distinction that IBIA returns to again and again. “An alert should therefore be viewed as an intelligence output requiring further investigation, not as proof that manipulation has occurred,” Ali says. “In many cases, increased alert numbers demonstrate that integrity systems are becoming more effective. The real measure is whether suspicious activity is identified quickly, shared with the appropriate authorities and investigated effectively.”

In short: an alert is the beginning of a process, not the end of one.

Why Football and Tennis Dominate the Alert List

Between 2021 and 2025, football and tennis accounted for the overwhelming majority of Africa-related alerts. Asked whether that concentration maps the real problem or merely maps the monitoring, Ali is clear: it is largely about monitoring and market structure.

“It is more accurate to say that the data shows where suspicious activity is being detected rather than where manipulation is definitively concentrated,” he says. “Importantly, an alert is not proof that a match has been manipulated. It indicates that suspicious betting activity has been identified and that an investigation should be conducted by the relevant authorities.”

The sport split is not accidental. It reflects both betting demand and the volume of regulated market activity monitored by IBIA. Football dominates betting across Africa, while tennis generates high betting liquidity globally across a large number of events. More events and more liquidity mean more opportunities for unusual patterns to emerge—and more data with which to spot them.

The Cross-Border Dimension

Another striking feature of IBIA’s data is that the betting behind a flagged match is often not located in the country where the match is played.

“Betting integrity is also increasingly international,” Ali notes. “An alert linked to an African sporting event may involve betting activity originating in Europe, Asia or elsewhere.”

That reality is illustrated by a global statistic from IBIA: around 90% of its football alerts involve customer accounts located outside the jurisdiction in which the sporting event takes place.

The implication is straightforward. National regulators and sports federations cannot protect their competitions by looking only at domestic betting operators. A suspicious pattern may be invisible in one country but obvious when viewed across multiple countries, currencies, and operators.

IBIA’s approach is designed to capture that cross-border picture. By combining account-level intelligence from operators across multiple jurisdictions, it can identify betting patterns that would be difficult, or sometimes impossible, to detect through isolated national monitoring alone.

Is Restricting Betting the Right Fix?

Some African sports federations have moved to restrict betting on their own domestic competitions, citing integrity concerns. The instinct is understandable. If a league fears that its matches are being manipulated through betting markets, removing betting from its competitions seems like a simple way to protect the sport.

Ali accepts that the aim is right: “Protecting sporting integrity is the right objective.” But he questions whether restriction actually removes the betting or simply displaces it.

“The question,” he says, “is whether restricting regulated betting removes that activity or simply pushes it towards poorly regulated or unregulated markets where there is little or no transparency.”

This is the central issue. A ban on regulated betting does not necessarily stop bets being placed. It may simply drive those bets to unlicensed operators who have no reporting obligations, no customer due diligence, and no connection to the sporting bodies that need protection.

Why Regulated Betting Is Part of the Solution

Ali argues that regulated betting offers safeguards that unregulated markets do not.

Licensed operators:

Those safeguards are largely absent in poorly regulated or unregulated markets. An illegal operator has no reason to share information with a football federation, and no legal obligation to do so.

From IBIA’s perspective, the strongest integrity outcomes come from well-regulated, competitive markets with high levels of “channelisation”—meaning the share of betting that flows through licensed operators rather than the black market. When channelisation is high, suspicious activity is easier to see and investigate.

“Regulated betting should therefore be viewed as part of the integrity solution rather than the problem,” Ali says. “The objective should be to ensure that betting takes place within environments where effective monitoring and international information sharing can protect both sport and consumers.”

From Alert to Outcome: The Enforcement Gap

Detecting suspicious betting is one thing. Doing something about it is another. On IBIA’s account, the harder challenge now lies less in spotting suspicious patterns than in what happens after those patterns are identified.

“An alert is the beginning of an investigation, not the end of one,” Ali says. “IBIA can identify suspicious betting activity using account-level intelligence supplied by its members, but successful outcomes depend on the wider integrity ecosystem.”

That ecosystem has several moving parts:

All of those actors need mechanisms to cooperate across borders. This is particularly challenging because an alert linked to an African sporting event may involve customer accounts, operators, and evidence located across several jurisdictions. An investigation may need information from one country’s licensed operator, another country’s regulator, and a third country’s law enforcement body.

What would close the gap, Ali suggests, is a combination of law, cooperation, and resource:

“Technology has significantly improved our ability to identify suspicious betting activity,” Ali says. “The next step is ensuring that investigative and enforcement processes evolve at the same pace.”

A Blueprint for the Future

Building Integrity into Licensing

What does IBIA want to see next in Africa? The answer is not simply more alerts or more data. It is about making integrity a formal part of how betting is licensed and regulated.

“Looking ahead, we would like to see sports betting integrity become a formal component of licensing and regulatory frameworks across the continent,” Ali says.

That means more than a general requirement to report suspicious activity. It means clear, enforceable rules requiring licensed operators to participate in official integrity monitoring arrangements, report suspicious betting patterns, and cooperate with sports bodies and regulators.

Many African jurisdictions, Ali notes, still lack these basic elements. “While progress is being made,” he says, “many jurisdictions still lack clear suspicious betting reporting protocols and recognised integrity monitoring arrangements.”

Lessons from Ontario and Alberta

IBIA points to Ontario and Alberta in Canada as examples of best practice. Both provinces require licensed operators to:

This approach makes integrity a condition of doing business, rather than a voluntary extra. It also creates an official channel through which information can flow from operators to the authorities who need it.

The African iGaming Alliance Partnership

IBIA’s partnership with the African iGaming Alliance is designed to support this vision. According to Ali, the partnership has “created a structured platform for engaging with regulators, operators and policymakers across more than twenty African jurisdictions.”

Crucially, the platform recognises that Africa is not a single, uniform betting market. It allows integrity expertise and regulatory experience to be shared across jurisdictions, while respecting the fact that each country needs its own approach.

Why Timing Matters

The window for action is still open. Africa’s regulated markets are evolving, and many currently do not have the deeply entrenched systems that older markets have built over decades. That is an advantage as well as a risk.

“Africa’s regulated markets are still evolving,” Ali says, “which presents an opportunity to build those integrity measures into regulation from the outset rather than retrofitting them later. This will strengthen confidence in both sport and regulated betting over the long term.”

Retrofitting integrity is harder than building it in. Once a market has grown, operators and regulators become used to existing practices, and changing them can be politically and commercially difficult. In a younger market, the rules can be written correctly from the beginning.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does a higher number of alerts mean more match-fixing?

Not necessarily. More alerts can reflect more betting activity, better monitoring, more participating operators, and improved data visibility. Alerts should be treated as intelligence signals, not as proof that a match has been manipulated.

Why do football and tennis account for so many alerts?

Both sports generate large betting volumes and high liquidity. Football is the dominant betting product across Africa, while tennis has a huge number of events with international betting markets. More betting activity means more data, and more data means more potential to detect suspicious patterns.

Should African leagues ban betting on their competitions?

Banning regulated betting on domestic competitions may push betting into unregulated markets with no transparency or reporting obligations. Regulated betting, by contrast, can generate account-level data that helps identify suspicious activity.

What happens after an IBIA alert?

An alert is shared with the relevant sports bodies, regulators, and sometimes law enforcement. Those authorities are responsible for investigating the alert, gathering evidence, and deciding whether any action is needed.

What would most improve integrity outcomes in Africa?

Ali highlights clear legal frameworks, cross-border information sharing, specialist investigative capacity, and the integration of integrity requirements into licensing and regulatory systems.

Key Takeaways