For years, the governing assumption in Africa’s fast-growing gaming industry has been that regulators face a trade-off: tighten the rules and risk strangling a lucrative market, or let the market run and risk leaving players exposed. At the 17th Annual GRAF Compliance Conference here, Evidentia AI set out to dismantle that assumption.
Safer play and a thriving gaming economy, the company argued, are not opposing forces. Both rest on the same foundation – regulation that is effective because it is well informed, able to see emerging risks clearly while leaving the player’s experience seamless and intact. The challenge, in this telling, is not whether to choose growth or protection, but how to achieve both at once.
Evidentia AI delivered that message through Ajibola Abdulkadir, its Commercial Director, who took her seat among a panel of senior regulators to examine what proactive player protection might actually look like on the continent. The session — “The Data-Driven Regulator: Utilizing Non-Intrusive Tech to Enforce Responsible Gaming,” sponsored by Policy Vault Africa – was moderated by Omotayo Okewunmi, Senior Adviser at PlaySafe Africa. Alongside Abdulkadir sat a cross-section of Africa’s regulatory leadership: Bashir Are, Chief Executive Officer of the Lagos State Lotteries and Gaming Authority; Didier Bobwa, Head of IT, Gambling and Games Monitoring in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and Moruntshi Kemorwale, Chief Executive Officer of the Gambling Authority in Botswana.
The question driving the discussion is one regulators across Africa are asking with growing urgency: how do you enforce responsible gaming standards without introducing friction for the players, operators and markets you are meant to serve? As the continent’s digital gaming economy expands, authorities find themselves walking a narrow line — encouraging innovation and industry growth on one side, shielding consumers from financial harm, addiction, fraud and data-security threats on the other.
Evidentia AI’s answer, put plainly to the room, inverted the usual logic. The solution is not more friction, Abdulkadir argued, but better visibility – technology that operates quietly in the background, surfacing behaviour-based risk indicators for regulators without ever intruding on the game itself.
Lessons from the field
The other panellists lent that abstract argument concrete form. Bobwa described how the DRC is modernising its oversight through a dedicated monitoring unit and a Central Monitoring System that stitches operators, payment providers and regulators into a shared data architecture. The system is designed to catch early signals – the first signs of addiction, unusual financial movements, excessive indebtedness – and is reinforced by regular server-security testing and incident-response requirements.
Are offered a sharper warning about the limits of narrow data. No regulator, he contended, can judge a player’s true risk from a single operator’s records, because players routinely spread their activity across multiple platforms precisely to slip past spending thresholds and cooling-off periods. He reached for a familiar analogy: just as a bank cannot assess a borrower responsibly without seeing their total exposure across every lender, a gaming regulator cannot see the whole player without a multi-source view.
Kemorwale, speaking from Botswana’s experience, pointed to an unexpected lesson. An AI-powered chatbot the authority deployed had surfaced a far wider range of consumer concerns than regulators had anticipated – a reminder that interactive tools can open a direct channel to public sentiment, revealing problems that would otherwise stay hidden. Different as these examples were, each circled back to the point Evidentia AI had placed on the table: oversight built on data and infrastructure, rather than intrusion, is what allows regulators to spot risk before it becomes harm.
A three-part prescription
From that shared diagnosis, Abdulkadir laid out a three-part prescription for what regulatory success should look like – a combination of stronger standards, regional cooperation and proactive consumer protection.
First, she called for API-based transaction monitoring to be written into law as a formal pre-licensing requirement. Standing access to transaction data, in her view, should not be a separate or optional afterthought. It belongs among the conditions an operator must satisfy before entering the market at all – so that standards are verified before a single player is ever exposed to risk.
Second, she urged African regulators to collaborate far more closely. Jurisdictions, she said, should trade practical lessons, compare their approaches and present case studies showing what has actually worked. Cross-border cooperation, she argued, can spare regulators the cost of working in isolation and speed the spread of effective policy across the continent.
Finally, she pressed for a decisive shift away from reactive enforcement toward proactive protection. Regulators, operators, government agencies and technology providers, she said, must work in concert to understand how players behave and to intervene before harm occurs – rather than arriving only after the damage is done.
A conviction, not a pitch
For Evidentia AI, none of this is a position assembled for the occasion. It is the conviction the company has organised its work around. Centralised monitoring, AI-powered engagement tools, multi-source data integration and robust cybersecurity are not, in its view, boxes to be ticked for compliance. They are the infrastructure that lets African regulators earn public trust while leaving operators the room to innovate — and they are precisely the categories of tooling the company builds for regulators, finance ministries and gaming boards.
The ambition, as Abdulkadir framed it, reaches beyond stricter enforcement toward something more fundamental: transformation. The aim is to equip regulators with the technology to identify risk early, respond intelligently, respect data privacy and place player safety at the centre of Africa’s expanding digital gaming economy. The company’s presence on the Maputo panel, by its own account, was one expression of a larger, continuing commitment – working alongside regulators to build the tools and standards that turn that vision into practice, in Mozambique and well beyond.
About Evidentia AI
Evidentia AI is a gaming revenue intelligence and compliance monitoring company. It builds AI-powered tools that give regulators, finance ministries and gaming boards real-time visibility into gaming transactions and revenue flows, without relying on intrusive oversight of players. Its mission is to help build gaming markets that are transparent, compliant and sustainable for regulators, operators and players alike.
