Kenya rewrites its gambling rules for the first time in 60 years under the Gambling Control Act 2025

Kenya has passed the Gambling Control Act 2025, the first full overhaul of its gaming regulation since the 1960s. For PSPs, acquirers, and betting operators, the point is not that the market is shrinking; it is that the rules of access, licensing, advertising, and payment acceptance are getting much tighter.

1. The new law introduces higher licensing thresholds, stricter advertising controls, and expanded powers for the regulator. It also points to market consolidation, which usually means smaller operators get pushed out while the survivors become easier to profile and easier to underwrite.
2. Kenya is one of Africa’s largest mobile betting markets, so this is not a side story. The market remains in place, but the risk profile is changing fast: more compliance cost, more scrutiny on operators, and less room for the sort of gray-zone setups that could previously survive on volume.
3. The regulation is explicitly digital-first, which puts pressure on payment infrastructure. M-Pesa and mobile wallets are now under heavier control, and that matters because payments are not just a checkout layer in Kenya; they are the access rail to the market itself.
4. Several local payment providers have already started telling merchants without a local license to get licensed or lose access to M-Pesa. The cuts are being made case by case, but the signal is blunt: operating in the gray zone on a Kenyan payment rail is getting harder to defend.
5. M-Pesa handles 90%+ of mobile transactions in the country. If an operator loses that rail, it loses the market. For licensed players, the upside is cleaner counterparty risk and a larger share of a market that is likely to concentrate around fewer, better-capitalized operators.

Kenya is following a path familiar to anyone who has watched Nigeria or South Africa go through regulatory tightening first and market maturation later. For high-risk payments teams, the near-term question is not whether to enter the market, but whether the compliance and licensing cost is now part of the price of staying in it.