Africa is not a Market and That Changes Your Entire Growth

For years, Africa has been discussed in iGaming as one of the industry’s biggest growth opportunities.

I think we need to be much more precise.

Because one of the easiest ways to get Africa wrong is to start with the sentence: “We need an Africa strategy.”

There is no single African consumer.
There is no single payment behaviour.
There is no single level of digital maturity.
And there certainly isn’t one marketing playbook that can simply be rolled out across the continent.

Kenya is not Nigeria. Nigeria is not South Africa. Ghana is not Côte d’Ivoire.

This sounds obvious. But surprisingly often, business and marketing strategies are still built as if geography itself were a customer segment.

And this is where I believe marketing needs to move much closer to business strategy.

Market Entry Starts before Marketing

When a company enters a new market, marketing is often brought into the conversation too late.

The business decides where to go.
Sales starts building a pipeline.
Product identifies what can be offered.
And marketing gets the task of generating awareness and leads.
I believe the sequence should be different.

Marketing should help answer a much more fundamental question:

What needs to be true for our business model to work in this market?

That means looking beyond market size.

How do people access digital products?
How do they pay?
What creates trust?
Where do they discover brands?
How expensive is data?
What devices are they actually using?
Which sports, communities and cultural references matter?
How mature is the regulatory environment?

And perhaps most importantly – what behaviour are we assuming that simply doesn’t exist there?

Africa is a particularly good example of why this matters.

GSMA estimates that almost one billion people across Africa were still not using mobile internet in 2025, despite being within an increasingly extensive mobile ecosystem. Affordability, devices, digital skills and relevant content remain major barriers. At the same time, mobile technologies and services contributed around $240 billion to the African economy in 2025.

So “mobile-first” is not enough as a strategy.

You need to understand what mobile-first actually means in a particular country.

Sometimes the Market tells you what the Product should be

Look at payments.

In many European markets, payments are almost invisible in the customer journey. The expectation is simply that they work.

Across African markets, payment infrastructure can actually define the product experience.

In Kenya, for example, M-Pesa has become deeply embedded in digital transactions, including betting. Across East, Central and parts of West Africa, mobile money remains central to deposits and withdrawals.

This changes more than your payment integration.

It changes onboarding.
It changes UX.
It changes conversion.
It changes CRM.
It changes what “friction” means.

And ultimately, it changes the commercial model.

The same applies to connectivity. A beautiful, feature-heavy product designed around European connectivity and high-end smartphones may look impressive in a boardroom and perform terribly in a market where data cost, device capability and connection stability affect everyday behaviour.

That is why localisation should never mean:

translate – change currency – connect payment method – launch campaign.

Real localisation means adapting the commercial system.

Localisation is behavioural, not cosmetic

There is another layer that businesses frequently underestimate – cultural relevance.

Research across African gaming markets including Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Senegal found that more than half of respondents consider cultural relevance important when choosing games, with similar demand for greater representation of African characters and environments.

This is an important distinction.

Localisation isn’t only about speaking the language.

It is about understanding the references, motivations and expectations behind behaviour.

And those expectations are evolving quickly.

This is where I think the next opportunity becomes particularly interesting.

The next competitive advantage may come from trends already visible outside iGaming

When entering an emerging market, companies naturally look at what competitors are doing.

I think that’s necessary – but insufficient.

Because if you only benchmark competitors, you optimise for today’s market.

The bigger strategic question is:

What are consumers already learning to expect elsewhere that our industry has not fully delivered yet?

Several signals across African consumer markets are worth watching.

1. Conversational commerce – conversational player journeys

Commerce is increasingly moving into conversations.

Consumers discover products through creators and social platforms, ask questions through messaging apps and increasingly make purchasing decisions without following the traditional website funnel.

The interesting question for iGaming isn’t whether an operator should have WhatsApp.

That’s tactical.

The strategic question is:

What happens when players expect the entire relationship with a brand to feel conversational?

Registration assistance.
Recommendations.
Customer support.
VIP communication.
Retention.
Payments.
Responsible gaming interventions.

Today, these are usually separate systems and teams.

The consumer increasingly sees one relationship.

That gap is an opportunity.

2. Social commerce – discovery without the traditional funnel

The traditional marketing funnel is becoming less linear.

In Kenya, 85% of consumers surveyed by Visa said they had purchased directly through social commerce. In Nigeria, the figure was 83%.

That’s a significant behavioural signal.

Discovery, trust, recommendation and transaction are moving closer together.

Yet much of iGaming acquisition still operates on an old architecture:

ad – landing page – registration – deposit – generic CRM.

What happens when the consumer expects something closer to:

content – conversation – personalised offer – instant action?

That is not simply a new acquisition channel.

It requires redesigning the journey.

3. AI-assisted discovery – AI-assisted gaming discovery

This one interests me particularly.

AI adoption among consumers is already surprisingly high in some African markets.

Visa’s 2026 research found that 89% of surveyed Kenyan consumers had used AI to assist with shopping, compared with 88% in Nigeria and 77% in South Africa.

Globally, the direction is similar. Consumers increasingly expect technology not simply to give them more choice, but to help them navigate that choice.

Now compare that with the way many gaming lobbies still work.

Hundreds or thousands of options.

Categories.
Banners.
Manually configured recommendations.

The player still has to search.

Consumer behaviour outside gaming is moving towards:

“Understand what I want and help me choose.”

That opens a much bigger opportunity than simply adding an AI chatbot.

It means moving from catalogue navigation to intelligent discovery.

4. Hyper-personalisation – localisation at the level of one

Historically, localisation meant country.

Then it became segment.

The next step is the individual.

Two Nigerian players are not automatically similar because they live in Nigeria.

Two Kenyan players may have completely different preferences, motivations, playing patterns and price sensitivity.

The technology increasingly allows us to combine both layers:

local context + individual behaviour.

This is where AI can become commercially meaningful.

Not AI because it is fashionable.

AI because it allows a business to understand a player faster and adapt the experience accordingly.

The strategic progression becomes:

Global – Regional – Country – Segment – Individual.

And each step potentially removes another layer of assumption.

5. Trust may become a product feature

There is one more consumer trend I would not underestimate.

AI adoption is moving faster than AI trust.

In Visa’s studies, only 29% of Kenyan consumers, 34% of Nigerian consumers and 23% of South African consumers said they currently trust AI agents to complete checkout, despite very high use of AI elsewhere in the shopping journey.

At the same time, social commerce creates its own trust problem. Among consumers in those studies who had experienced scams, social media was frequently where those scams occurred.

For regulated industries, this matters enormously.

The future isn’t simply more automation.

It is automation with visible control, explainability, security and the right human intervention.

Especially when money – and high-value customers – are involved.

The mistake is copying what already works

When companies enter Africa, they often ask:

“What works there?”

It’s an important question.

But I would add two more:

What has stopped working?

And:

What will the customer expect next?

The first protects your investment.

The second creates your advantage.

If everyone is using the same acquisition channels, the same football sponsorships, the same bonuses and the same localisation logic, copying the market may get you market parity.

It won’t necessarily give you differentiation.

Sometimes the better source of strategy is not another betting operator.

It might be fintech.