African gaming has grown quickly over the past several years, but the infrastructure making that growth possible rarely gets the attention it deserves. According to gaming industry figure Gene Grand, the real story behind Africa’s betting boom is not the games themselves. It is the mobile wallets moving money in and out of them.
Africa’s sports betting market was valued at approximately $3.08 billion in 2025, while the continent’s broader gambling market is estimated at $17.63 billion and projected to approach $19.70 billion with 64.7 million active users by 2029. That growth is inseparable from the spread of mobile money.
Services such as M-Pesa in East Africa, MTN Mobile Money, Airtel Money, and Orange Money across francophone West Africa have given operators direct access to a customer base whose mobile money accounts materially outnumber those holding a debit or credit card. In Kenya specifically, more than 90 percent of online bets are placed through M-Pesa alone, a level of concentration on a single payment rail that has few parallels anywhere else in global gaming. That dominance is consistent with account-level data showing that a large majority of adult Kenyans already hold M-Pesa accounts, well ahead of debit or credit card ownership in the country. Grand describes the industry as still talking about the market backwards. “Most of the industry still talks about African gaming as if cards are the default and mobile money is the workaround. It is the other way round. Cards are the exception here, not mobile wallets.”
That framing gap matters because it shapes how operators design their onboarding flows, often defaulting to card fields first when mobile wallet entry should be the primary path.
Why Reliability Matters More Than Almost Anything Else
The defining advantage of mobile money in African markets is not convenience alone. It is reliability. Wallet-to-wallet transfers achieve approval rates approaching 100 percent when funds are available in the account, a sharp contrast to the higher decline rates that remain common with card payments across the region.
That difference shapes player behaviour in ways operators cannot afford to ignore. Players accustomed to near-instant M-Pesa transfers for everyday transactions now reject multi-day withdrawal timeframes from gaming operators outright, treating payout speed as a basic expectation rather than a premium feature. Grand puts the player’s perspective bluntly. “Once a player has moved money instantly for years through their phone, a three-day withdrawal does not read as normal industry practice. It reads as the operator holding their money hostage. Speed is not a nice-to-have in this market. It is the product.” This is exactly why payout speed has become a genuine competitive lever rather than a back-office metric operators can quietly deprioritise.
One Continent, Several Different Payment Realities
The fragmentation that defines African gaming regulation shows up just as clearly in payments infrastructure. Nigeria stands as the clearest example. Mobile money penetration in the country sits at roughly four percent, a fraction of the 90-plus percent seen in Kenya, meaning Nigerian players rely instead on instant bank transfers and fintech wallets such as OPay and PalmPay.
That gap forces a fundamentally different integration strategy for operators. A payment stack built around M-Pesa integration for East Africa will not translate to Nigeria, and a strategy built around Nigerian fintech rails will not work in Francophone West Africa, where Orange Money and MTN Mobile Money dominate instead.
For operators building pan-African strategies, that fragmentation is not a footnote. It is one of the central engineering challenges of entering the market at all.
What This Means for Operators Building Across the Continent
Payment infrastructure in African gaming is not a technical afterthought sitting behind the product. It is a core determinant of conversion, retention, and the basic level of trust a player extends to an operator. “Get the payment layer wrong in an African market and it does not matter how good the odds or the product are. Players will simply move to whichever operator pays out the way their bank app already does.”
That standard, set by the bank app rather than by any gaming-industry benchmark, is the one operators are now being measured against whether they intended to compete on it or not.
Gene Grand’s view is that operators who treat mobile money integration as a market-by-market engineering project, rather than a single continental rollout, are the ones best positioned to convert Africa’s rapid user growth into durable, retained player bases over the next several years.
