Editorial Guidelines & Rating Methodology
At AfricanBettingGuides (ABG) our job is to tell a reader, before they deposit, whether an operator is licensed where they live, whether it can actually pay them, and what its terms really say. Reviews are written by named analysts, scored against six published criteria, and corrected in public when we get something wrong.
Our Core Editorial Principles
Uncompromised Independence
Our reviews cannot be bought. We do earn affiliate commission from some of the operators we list, and we disclose it on every page where it applies — but commercial status is not one of the six criteria the Trust Index is built from, so there is no field an operator could pay to change. The one commercial partnership we hold is documented in full, including the two non-partner operators that score above the partner on its own country page.
One Model, Applied the Same Way
We do not write "good odds" and leave it there. Each operator is scored from 0 to 10 against six written tests — licensing, payments, product, terms, support and safety — and the published Trust Index is the weighted mean of those six. The weights are fixed and identical for every operator and every market. The full model, and the test behind each criterion, is on how we rate bookmakers.
Strict Local Compliance
Africa is not a single market. Our content is geo-targeted, and an operator only appears on a country page if we can find it on that country's own licensing register — the Gambling Regulatory Authority in Kenya, the Gaming Commission of Ghana, the state boards in Nigeria, the provincial boards in South Africa, and their equivalents elsewhere. An offshore registration is not a substitute, and an operator licensed in one of our markets is not listed in the others on the strength of it.
The ABG Review Lifecycle
Phase 1: Licensing and corporate check Licensing
Before an account is even created, we look for the operator on the licensing authority's own published register for the market in question, and check that the licence term is current and that the product category covers what the operator is actually selling. What we can confirm at source is recorded; what we cannot confirm is not published. Where a register does not publish a piece of information — Ghana's, for example, publishes categories and licence terms but not certificate numbers — we say so rather than print a number a reader cannot check.
Phase 2: Account and payments testing Country analyst
The country analyst opens a verified account with local identification, funds it with their own money, and uses the payment rails people in that market actually use — M-Pesa in Kenya, MTN MoMo and Telecel Cash in Ghana, the local gateways in Nigeria, and so on. Deposits and withdrawals are timed and support is contacted with a real enquiry. No operator-provided test credit and no marketing accounts.
Phase 3: Terms and product assessment Editorial
We read the bonus terms against the headline: the wagering base, the qualifying-bet rules, the time limit and the maximum bonus, and whether the two agree. Product breadth is confirmed on the operator's own country site rather than assumed from another market, because a feature list copied across borders is wrong more often than not. The six criterion scores are set at the end of this phase.
Phase 4: Publication and review Editorial
The review is published with its criterion table and its computed Trust Index, and it does not then sit still: scores are revisited when a licence, a payment rail, a bonus term or a regulator's rules change, and when a score moves we say so. Because the total is computed from the criterion scores rather than stored, a revision updates the review, the country pages, the comparison tables and any article that cites the number in the same change.
Fact-Checking Policy
Claims a reader might act on are checked against a primary source and recorded: a licensing register for a licence, the regulator or the revenue authority for a tax rule, the operator's own published terms for a bonus condition. Where we cannot confirm something at source we leave it out rather than repeat it — an incomplete review is better than a confident wrong one. Reviews carry the name of the analyst responsible for them; you can see who they are on our editorial team page.
Corrections Policy
When we find an error, or an operator changes something material, we amend the page and leave the correction visible with the date on it — we do not quietly restate a conclusion. A correction that changes a published score or withdraws a claim is written into the page itself, at the top, where the reader who was misled will see it. Every page carries a last-updated date. If you think something here is wrong, tell us; if you are right, the correction gets published.
Strict Affiliate Disclosure
AfricanBettingGuides Media LLC is a free, ad-supported platform. We may earn a commission when you click through to a sportsbook and open an account. That commercial relationship does not influence the criterion scores or the Trust Index computed from them, and it is disclosed wherever it applies. Operators cannot buy a higher Trust Index, buy their way onto a country page they are not licensed in, or have negative terms removed. The full framework is on our affiliate disclosure page.