IBIA says rising African betting alerts signal better detection, not more fixing
Chief executive Khalid Ali tells iGaming Business that growth in Africa's regulated betting market is improving integrity monitoring rather than driving more match-fixing.
Khalid Ali, chief executive of the International Betting Integrity Association (IBIA), has said increased numbers of suspicious betting alerts linked to African sporting events reflect stronger detection systems rather than a rise in match-fixing, according to iGaming Business.
The association's 2025 Sports Betting Integrity Report cites projections from H2 Gambling Capital showing Africa's total betting gross gambling revenue growing from $3.5 billion in 2021 to $19.4 billion by 2030. Online betting is expected to account for most of that expansion, reaching $16.4 billion by 2030, with $13 billion, or 79%, generated onshore.
Ali told iGaming Business that this growth should be seen as an opportunity rather than purely a risk. "That growth presents an opportunity as much as a challenge," he said, noting that account-based digital betting gives licensed operators data they can use to spot suspicious activity before it develops further.
He pointed to football as the continent's dominant betting product, adding that around 90% of IBIA's football alerts worldwide involve customer accounts registered outside the jurisdiction where the match takes place. That pattern, he said, is why integrity monitoring needs to combine global data-sharing with local partnerships rather than relying on national oversight alone.
IBIA recorded 117 alerts relating to African sporting events between 2021 and 2025, including 31 in 2025, a year in which Africa accounted for roughly 10% of all alerts the association logged globally. A further 17 alerts followed in the first half of 2026, which Ali described as consistent with the prior year's rate rather than a sign of escalation.
He cautioned against reading alert volumes as a direct measure of manipulation. "It is impossible, and potentially misleading, to conclude that more alerts automatically mean more match-fixing," he said, attributing the rise instead to growing betting activity, more Africa-facing operators joining international monitoring networks, and greater availability of account-level data to analyse.
Ali framed an alert as "an intelligence output requiring further investigation, not as proof that manipulation has occurred", arguing that the real test of a functioning integrity system is whether suspicious activity is flagged quickly, passed to the right authorities and properly investigated.
Football and tennis generated the large majority of Africa-related alerts recorded between 2021 and 2025. Ali said this concentration reflects betting demand and the scale of regulated market activity IBIA monitors rather than proof of where manipulation is most common, describing tennis as a sport with high global betting liquidity across a large number of events.
He also noted that betting linked to an African match is frequently placed elsewhere. "An alert linked to an African sporting event may involve betting activity originating in Europe, Asia or elsewhere," he said, which he argued underscores the value of cross-border monitoring that isolated national systems cannot replicate.
Asked about moves by some African sports federations to restrict betting on their own domestic competitions over integrity concerns, Ali said protecting sporting integrity was the right goal but questioned the method. He said the key issue was "whether restricting regulated betting removes that activity or simply pushes it towards poorly regulated or unregulated markets where there is little or no transparency".