Africa Operator Database: 3,609 Licences Across 7 Registers

Africa Operator Database: 3,609 Licences Across 7 Registers

We parsed every publicly accessible official gambling register in Africa – seven jurisdictions, from South Africa's national portal to Lagos State's blacklist. The result is a single database of 3,609 licence records. The most telling number in it: fewer than 4% of those records include an operator website.

Key Takeaways

• 3,609 licence records aggregated from 7 official African registers (compiled June 2026)
• South Africa's national portal lists 3,008 operators – but only 551 are bookmakers, and its URL column is empty on every row
• Only 138 records (3.8%) across all seven registers include an operator website or domain
• Lagos State publishes Africa's only official illegal-operator blacklist – 46 named brands
• 73 of 172 entries on the Lagos licensed list show expiry dates that have already passed

What We Built and Why

Africa's betting boom is one of the most-covered gambling stories of 2026, and we have already mapped the market side – 440 million bettors, mobile money rails, and fragmenting regulation. What nobody had built was the supply side: a unified, citable count of who is actually licensed, by whom, with what public footprint.

So we went register by register. The inclusion rule was strict – official regulator publications only, parsed directly from the primary source. No press summaries, no third-party compilations, no review-site data. Seven jurisdictions currently publish a usable register; we pulled and parsed six of them live on 12 June 2026. Kenya's regulator blocks access from outside the country, so its register comes from an Internet Archive capture of the official BCLB page dated 9 December 2025 – flagged wherever it matters below:

The countries missing from this table are a finding in themselves. Tanzania's Gaming Board runs an online licensing system, but public inspection requires a personal-ID request form. Zambia's regulator has no website. Rwanda, Mozambique, and Ethiopia publish nothing parseable at all. For most of the continent, "is this casino licensed?" is a question the official infrastructure cannot answer.

South Africa – 3,008 Rows, Zero URLs

The largest dataset by far is South Africa's NGB verified-operators portal, launched in April 2026 specifically to help the public confirm whether an operator is legal. It consolidates all nine provincial licensing authorities into 3,008 records: 2,223 site operators, 551 bookmakers, 82 bingo licensees, 94 totalisator entries, and 38 casinos.

The bookmaker class is the one that matters for online play – under South African law, licensed bookmakers may offer online sports betting while online casino games remain prohibited. Provincial concentration is heavy: Gauteng alone holds 173 of the 551 bookmaker licences (31%), and the top three provinces – Gauteng, Eastern Cape, and Western Cape – account for 57% between them.

And then there is the empty column. The portal's schema includes a URL field on every row – on a register built, by the NGB's own description, to combat illegal online gambling. It is populated exactly zero times in 3,008 records. A South African player using the government's own verification tool cannot connect a single licensed bookmaker to the website where they would actually bet. Industry criticism of the portal's accuracy surfaced within weeks of launch; the data was last updated 1 March 2026, before the portal even went public.

Kenya – the Best Register, Frozen Mid-Handover

Kenya's register is the closest thing Africa has to an Anjouan-style dataset. The official 2025/26 licensed-companies list – published under the new Gambling Regulatory Authority banner – carries 187 operators with legal entity, trading name, licence numbers across three categories, renewal status, and, for 124 of them, the operator's actual domain.

That domain column makes Kenya the only African jurisdiction where you can mechanically join "licensed entity" to "website taking bets." It also captures the market's structure: international brands (1xBet, Melbet, 888starz) holding Kenyan licences alongside the domestic giants Betika and Odibets.

The timing caveat is real – twice over. Kenya is mid-transition from the BCLB to the GRA under the Gambling Control Act 2025; the regulator suspended licence applications during the handover and fresh applications are required under the new authority. And because the regulator's site blocks non-Kenyan traffic, our copy of the register is an archive capture of the official page from 9 December 2025. By that date, the 99 operators initially approved in July 2025 had grown to 187 on the official list. This is the before picture of a full relicensing; how many survive the GRA's first cycle is the follow-up question.

Uganda – Six Years of PDFs, the Only Time Series

Uganda's NLGRB publishes a clean annual PDF of licensed companies, and it has done so every year since 2021 – the only longitudinal series on the continent. The 2026 list carries 91 licence records with an explicit mode-of-operation flag: 39 licences are designated Online, and around 30 records include operator websites.

The licence-number scheme itself is machine-readable (betting, casino, gambling-software, bingo, and machine classes), which means churn, online migration, and brand survival can be computed year over year. The international-brand pattern repeats here: 1xBet and 22Bet both hold Ugandan paper alongside domestic operators.

Lagos – the Only Blacklist in Africa

Nigeria after the November 2024 Supreme Court ruling is a federation of gambling regulators – the decision voided federal authority and left licensing to the states. That makes Lagos State, the flagship market, the register that matters. The LSLGA list carries 172 licensed entries across 14 categories, ONLINE SPORTS BETTING/ONLINE CASINO being the largest at 59 entries – Bet9ja, BetKing, and the rest of the Nigerian market's heavyweights among them.

Lagos also publishes something no other African regulator does: an official list of 46 illegal/unlicensed gaming companies. A government blacklist is a rare, citable enforcement artifact – most jurisdictions block quietly or not at all.

The data-quality finding cuts the other way: 73 of the 172 licensed entries – 42% – display licence end dates that have already passed. Whether those operators renewed without the register updating, or lapsed without being removed, the official list cannot say. On the continent's most scrutinized state register, "licensed" and "currently licensed" are different claims.

The Comoros Problem

One African register requires a disclosure rather than a celebration. The Mwali (Mohéli) register of MISA – the Mwali International Services Authority – lists just 13 licensed gambling companies, complete with UBO names and licence dates. Mohéli is one of three islands of the Union of the Comoros. Another is Anjouan, whose register of 2,496 brands is the basis of our largest database project.

Here is the disclosure: the Central Bank of Comoros has publicly described MISA as a fictitious structure with no legal recognition, in a communiqué first issued in 2022 and re-published by the Comorian finance ministry in December 2025 – and the same notice names Anjouan offshore registries. The communiqué's scope is banking and financial licensing, not gambling specifically, but the constitutional dispute underneath it applies to the whole archipelago.

We document these registers; we do not vouch for them. Our Anjouan database exists precisely because thousands of real casino brands operate under paper whose legal foundations are contested – that is a grey market worth measuring, not an endorsement of the regulator measuring it. The same register feeds our Japan Defiance Index, which tracks whether Anjouan licensees complied with a G7 government's blocking request. The 13-entity Mwali list versus the far larger population of sites displaying Mwali licence seals is a gap we may quantify in a future report.

What the 3.8% Number Means

Add it up: 3,609 official licence records, 138 of them carrying an operator website – 3.8%. For players, the registers mostly cannot answer the only question players ask. For journalists, every "X licensed operators in Africa" figure in circulation is an aggregate of stale snapshots. And for offshore operators, the gap is the business model: when domestic licensing is opaque, an offshore badge looks no worse to the average bettor – a dynamic our global crypto casino adoption report documents from the operator side.

One more cross-reference puts a number on that last point. We matched the African registers against our 2,496-brand Anjouan database: just 17 unique brand names appear on both sides (22 register matches in total) – international operators like 1xBet and Melbet that hold domestic African licences and Anjouan paper for other markets. The domestic and offshore licensing worlds barely touch. The full dataset – all 3,609 rows, normalized, with source URLs per register – is available to journalists and researchers on request: [email protected].

FAQ

Which African countries publish a gambling licence register?

Seven publish a parseable public register as of June 2026: South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Lagos State (Nigeria), Botswana, and the Comorian island of Mohéli. Tanzania requires an identity-verified request; most other jurisdictions publish nothing.

How do I check if a betting site is licensed in South Africa?

The NGB verified-operators portal lists all 3,008 licensed operators by name, licence number, and province – but no websites. You must match the brand name on the site to the register manually, and the data was last updated in March 2026.

Is gambling regulated at the federal level in Nigeria?

Not currently. The Supreme Court ruled in November 2024 that gambling regulation belongs to the states. A federal Central Gaming Bill passed the Senate in December 2025 but was rejected, leaving 36 states plus the FCT as the licensing authorities.

How current is this database?

Six registers were pulled and parsed live on 12 June 2026; Kenya's comes from a 9 December 2025 archive capture of the official page, since the regulator's site is unreachable from outside Kenya. Each register has its own internal staleness – South Africa's data is dated 1 March 2026, and 42% of Lagos entries show passed expiry dates. We refresh quarterly.

Sources

1. 1National Gambling Board (South Africa) – Verified Operators portal – 3,008 records across all nine provinces, parsed in full
2. 2iGaming Afrika – NGB clarification on the verified-operators portal – industry criticism of the portal's accuracy, May 2026
3. 3BCLB / Gambling Regulatory Authority of Kenya – Licensed gaming companies 2025/26 – 187 operators with domains; parsed from a 9 December 2025 archive capture
4. 4BCLB – Transition to the Gambling Regulatory Authority of Kenya – licence applications suspended during the handover
5. 5National Lotteries and Gaming Regulatory Board (Uganda) – Licensed companies – annual PDFs 2021–2026, the continent's only time series
6. 6Chambers – Nigeria's Supreme Court decision on lottery regulation – the November 2024 ruling that moved gambling to the states
7. 7Lagos State Lotteries and Gaming Authority – Illegal operators list – Africa's only official blacklist, 46 named brands
8. 8Finance Magnates – Comoros licensing dispute and central bank communiqué – the BCC notice naming MISA and Anjouan registries
9. 9Ghana Gaming Commission – Licensed operators – 86 licence entries with issue and expiry dates
10. 10Gambling Authority Botswana – Bookmaker betting licensees – six licensed bookmakers