By Joshua Biden & Olive Aniunoh
In low-income districts of towns in Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone, a small kiosk fitted with a television screen, a betting terminal, and a queue of young people has become as familiar a feature of the urban landscape as the roadside kiosk selling recharge cards. These betting shops are rarely found in the wealthier suburbs; they cluster instead in the slums, motor parks and informal settlements where formal employment is scarce and hope is a scarce commodity. This clustering is not accidental. It reflects a deliberate commercial logic in which gambling operators target the economically desperate with the promise of rapid, effortless wealth.
Nigeria’s gambling industry has grown into one of the largest in Africa, with estimates of annual revenue ranging from roughly USD 500 million for the online segment alone to over USD 3.6 billion for the sector as a whole, and with more than 60 million Nigerians, aged between 18 and 40, betting on a regular basis. This growth has occurred against the backdrop of a youth population confronting acute joblessness, with one 2025 national assessment placing youth unemployment as high as 53 per cent and estimating that some 80 million young Nigerians are without work. The coincidence of a booming betting economy and a deepening youth employment crisis raises an uncomfortable analytical question: is gambling merely a symptom of economic exclusion, or has it become an active driver of criminal activities such as cultism, drugpeddling etc that increasingly define urban youth life in West Africa?
This anrticl examines the empirical evidence connecting the proliferation of gambling outlets in low-income urban areas to poverty among youth, restiveness and crime in selected West African countries such as Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone. It argues that gambling functions less as a pathway out of poverty than as a coping mechanism for it, one that in many cases deepens indebtedenss, feeds informal criminal economies and interacts with the same structural drivers – joblessness, weak social protection and urban marginalisation – that fuel wider youth restiveness.
The Scale of the Problem: Gambling’s Growth in West Africa
West Africa’s betting boom is part of a wider continental pattern. Africa is now home to over 440 million sports bettors. The continent’s youthful demography, rising smartphone penetration and the spread of mobile money platforms have combined to remove the traditional frictions of banking, allowing bettors to fund accounts instantly from a handset.
Nigeria sits at the centre of this expansion. Industry estimates place the country’s overall betting revenue at up to USD 3.63 billion for 2025, with more than 60 million Nigerians, most between 18 and 40 years old, wagering on a regular basis. Nearly 90 per cent of bets are placed via smartphone, facilitated by fintech infrastructure from firms such as Flutterwave, Paystack, OPay and PalmPay and by the National Inter-Bank Settlement System, which allows even the unbanked to deposit and withdraw funds with ease. One industry estimate suggests that between 1 and 8 per cent of Nigerian bettors already display signs of problem gambling, with a further 10 to 15 per cent considered at risk of developing one.
The pattern is mirrored, at differing scales, elsewhere in the region. Ghana’s online gambling market reached gross wins of roughly USD 903.5 million in 2025, a 24 per cent increase on the previous year, and the country’s Gaming Commission has publicly estimated that nearly 70 per cent of young Ghanaians engage in some form of entertainment gamblin (Ghanamma, 2025). In Sierra Leone, by contrast, the sector remains largely unregulated: gambling is legal for those aged 18 and above, but oversight rests loosely with the Ministry of Finance, with no dedicated gaming regulator and scant enforcement of existing rules (Bookmakers.bet, 2026). What differs across the three countries is not the underlying demand, driven everywhere by young, economically precarious populations, but the maturity of the regulatory apparatus attempting to manage it.
The Poverty–Gambling Nexus
The clustering of betting shops in slums is best understood through the lens of what researchers studying gambling across sub-Saharan Africa describe as a pursuit of hope amid economic deprivation. Bitanihirwe et al. (2022) argue that because gamblers are effectively sold the promise of a better life, economically disadvantaged young people are especially likely to embrace betting as a means of escaping harsh material circumstances, and that pecuniary need, rather than mere entertainment, is among the most compelling drivers of gambling participation on the continent.
This dynamic is visible across West Africa, although headline unemployment figures can obscure the depth of the problem. In Nigeria, modelled International Labour Organisation estimatesplace youth unemployment at 5.3 per cent in 2024–2025, a relatively modest figure that captures only young people aged 15–24 who are without work, available for work and actively seeking employment. Ghana presents a similar picture as the corresponding rate was 5.35 per cent in 2024, rising to 5.83 per cent in 2025. Sierra Leone’s modelled youth unemployment rate was lower, at 3.49 per cent in 2024 and 3.72 per cent in 2025.
Yet these figures should not be read as evidence that West Africa’s youth employment challenge is modest. Headline unemployment measures exclude many young people who have stopped looking for work, are working fewer hours than they would like, or survive through low-productivity informal activity. In Nigeria, civil society assessments paint a considerably starker picture. The State of the Nigerian Youth Report 2025 found that more than half of the country’s young people are without jobs, while approximately 1.7 million graduates leave Nigerian universities and polytechnics each year and enter a labour market with limited capacity to absorb them. This gap between modelled unemployment and lived experience is important: it reflects the scale of underemployment, informality and labour-force exclusion that headline unemployment figures routinely understate.
Seen from this wider West African perspective, therefore, the challenge is not simply a shortage of jobs. It is a shortage of decent, productive and accessible work, particularly for young people entering labour markets where formal employment remains limited. The relatively low modelled unemployment rates in Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone should consequently be interpreted alongside measures of underemployment, informality, labour-force participation and the quality and security of available work.
Betting shops are commercially rational in locating within this landscape. Low overheads, high footfall from idle daytime populations, and a customer base for whom even small stakes represent a plausible route to a transformative windfall make slums and informal settlements natural markets. A Lagos-based study of gambling’s effects on youth welfare found that as unemployment rose, young people increasingly committed time, money and effort to gambling avenues such as Baba Ijebu, bet9ja, Naira Bet and Western Lotto Bet, using winnings to meet daily expenses and supplement incomes lost to joblessness. Gambling, in other words, is frequently adopted not as leisure but as an improvised, high-risk substitute for absent social protection.
Mapping the Nexus: Restiveness, Unemployment and Crime
Youth restiveness, understood as the expression of youthful frustration through disorderly, often violent conduct, has consistently been linked to unemployment, inadequate infrastructure and the absence of social amenities. Its manifestations range from cultism and armed robbery to kidnapping, militancy and political violence, and analysts increasingly treat gambling as one node within this broader web of coping and criminal behaviour rather than as a discrete social problem (Oke & Ahoton, 2024), (Enria, L,2015).
Empirical support for a direct statistical relationship between joblessness and gambling-adjacent crime is beginning to accumulate. A 2025 study of unemployed graduates in Lagos found a statistically significant relationship between graduate unemployment and social crimes including gambling, prostitutionand youth restiveness, although, notably, no significant relationship emerged between unemployment and cybercrime specifically in that sample. This nuance matters as it suggests that the unemployment–crime relationship operates through several distinct channels, of which gambling-related behaviour is one, rather than a single undifferentiated pathway from joblessness to criminality. (see also Dwumah et al. and Bangura, Lynch, Binns and Gbanie (2023)
In Nigeria, the historical record situates today’s betting shops within a longer lineage of informal urban vice economies. Scholarship on street cultism in Lagos traces the emergence of organised youth criminal groups, such as the historically documented ‘Awawa Boys’ and ‘One Million Boys’, to conditions of urban marginalisation in which gambling, loafing and petty theft were long recorded as intertwined features of male juvenile delinquency on Lagos Island. The contemporary betting shop is a technologically updated node within an older ecology of urban informal economies in which gambling losses, debt and idleness feed into petty crime, gang recruitment and, in the gravest cases, cultism. Establishing firm causation from betting-shop density to crime rates would require dedicated geospatial and criminal-justice data that is not yet systematically published in Nigeria; what the existing literature supports is a robust, theoretically grounded association operating through the shared drivers of unemployment, debt and urban marginalisation.
Ghana offers a case of more advanced regulatory awareness without commensurate enforcement. The Gaming Commission of Ghana has partnered with the Mental Health Authority to warn tertiary students that unchecked betting can lead to depression, anxiety, drug use, financial ruin and, in some cases, custodial sentences for young people who steal to fund their habit, and has announced plans for a dedicated Gaming Addiction Rehabilitation Centre in Asawase. Yet a recent critical analysis of Ghana’s Gaming Actfound that the legislation frames problem gambling chiefly as a matter of individual responsibility, with comparatively little attention to structural harm prevention or minimisation.
Sierra Leone illustrates the risks of the opposite extreme: an almost complete regulatory vacuum layered atop severe structural fragility. More than 80 per cent of young Sierra Leoneans live below the two-dollar-a-day poverty threshold, and youth unemployment accounts for close to 69 per cent of all unemployment in the country, a legacy directly tied by researchers to the economic marginalisation that helped precipitate the country’s eleven-year civil war. Betting in Sierra Leone remains legal and largely unpoliced, overseen loosely by the Ministry of Finance with no dedicated regulator for the fast-growing online segment. Where Nigeria and Ghana are wrestling with how to regulate an already-entrenched industry, Sierra Leone is confronting the earlier, arguably more dangerous, stage in which an unregulated gambling economy is expanding into a population with acute post-conflict vulnerabilities and thin institutional capacity.
Across all three countries, the common denominator is a youthful population for whom gambling operators, whether formally licensed or informal, offer one of the few readily accessible promises of rapid economic mobility. The variable is institutional capacity to manage the resulting social cost, a capacity that is strongest, though still incomplete, in Ghana, contested and fragmented in Nigeria, and largely absent in Sierra Leone.
Policy and Regulatory Gaps
Nigeria’s regulatory architecture for gambling has, if anything, become more fragmented rather than less. A November 2024 Supreme Court ruling nullified the federal National Lottery Act 2005, transferring regulatory authority over lotteries and games of chance to individual state governments and confining the National Lottery Regulatory Commission’s remaining mandate to the Federal Capital Territory alone. The result is a patchwork of state-level regimes of widely varying sophistication: Lagos and Rivers States have relatively developed licensing authorities, some states retain only outdated penal-code provisions criminalising unlicensed betting houses, and others have no accessible gaming law at all (Aluko & Oyebode, 2025). A Central Gaming Bill, intended to re-centralise online gaming regulation, remains before the National Assembly, while a group of states has separately signed a Universal Reciprocity Licence framework to harmonise licensing among themselves.
This regulatory fragmentation matters directly for the poverty-crime nexus. Inconsistent state oversight makes it difficult to enforce age verification, advertising restrictions or the zoning limits that some jurisdictions, including Ghana, impose to keep betting shops away from schools. It also leaves informal, unlicensed betting kiosks, precisely the sort concentrated in low-income neighbourhoods, largely outside any meaningful regulatory gaze. Underlying all of this is a deeper policy gap: the near-total absence of youth-targeted social protection or employment schemes robust enough to compete with the psychological pull of a bet that promises to transform a young person’s economic circumstances overnight.
Recommendations
Addressing the gambling-poverty-crime nexus requires coordinated action across several classes of actor, rather than reliance on any single lever.
i. Harmonise fragmented gambling regulations: There is a need for each country to harmonise fragmented gambling regulations. This would close the enforcement gaps that unlicensed slum-based betting shops currently exploit. Mandatory, independently verified age and identity checks, restrictions on the density and location of betting outlets in low-income neighbourhoods is necessary.
ii. Intelligence-led monitoring of betting clusters: Security and law enforcement agencies should adopt intelligence-led monitoring of betting clusters with documented links to debt-driven theft, cultism or fraud. This would be more effective than periodic raids alone and would benefit from closer data-sharing with state gaming regulators and financial intelligence units already tracking anti-money-laundering compliance in the sector.
iii. Targeted livelihood, vocational and financial literacy programming in slums and peri urban communities: For development partners and civil society organisations, targeted livelihood, vocational and financial literacy programming in the same slum and peri-urban communities where betting shops are concentrated would directly address the economic desperation that gambling operators currently monetise, while complementing existing donor-funded employment and stabilisation programming in Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone.
iv. Adopt genuine responsible-gambling protocols: The private sector and gambling operators themselves, should adopt genuine responsible-gambling protocols, self-exclusion registries, spending limits and advertising codes that avoid targeting economically vulnerable youth, following the advertising-vetting model Ghana has begun to develop, would reduce the social externalities the industry currently generates while protecting its own long-term licence to operate.
The rapid proliferation of gambling across West Africa’s low-income urban neighbourhoods is best read not as an isolated vice but as a visible symptom of deeper structural exclusion, from mass youth unemployment to thin social protection and the absence of credible economic alternatives. The evidence reviewed in this papersupports a considered conclusion rather than an alarmist one. Betting shops do not, by themselves, manufacture criminality, but they cluster where economic desperation is greatest, and they interact with the same drivers, from joblessness and debt tomarginalisation, that the wider literature on youth restiveness identifies as the roots of cultism, petty crime and, in the gravest cases, organised violence. Left unaddressed, the continued expansion of an under-regulated betting economy into Nigeria’s, Ghana’s and Sierra Leone’s most vulnerable communities risks entrenching, rather than alleviating, the very restiveness that policymakers across the region are seeking to contain. The task ahead is not to suppress a form of leisure that millions of young West Africans freely choose, but to ensure that its growth is no longer subsidised by the desperation of a generation for whom formal economic opportunity remains out of reach.
(Joshua Biem is a Senior Policy and Research Analyst at Nextier; while Olive Aniunoh is a Legal, Policy and Research Consultant at Nextier)
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