Betting licences in Zambia: a 1958 Act, a board you cannot write to online, and no register

The question this page answers

“Is this site licensed in Zambia?” sounds like a question with a yes or a no behind it. In Zambia it does not have one, and the reason is worth ten minutes of your time before you deposit anything anywhere.

In most markets a licence claim is checkable. The regulator publishes a list, you search it for the company name, and either the entry is there or it is not. Tanzania does this. So does Kenya, so does Nigeria, so do the offshore jurisdictions whose names appear at the bottom of international betting sites. Zambia does not. There is no published list of licensed bookmakers, no regulator website on which such a list could sit, and no online route to ask.

That absence is not a scandal and we are not going to present it as one. It is what happens when a licensing regime written in the 1950s for a few dozen physical bookmakers is left in place while an online market grows on top of it. But it has one hard consequence for you: on this market, an operator’s claim about its Zambian licence is the operator’s claim, and nothing on the public record can confirm or contradict it.

The Act that decides who is licensed

Everything starts with one statute, and its age is not a detail.

The Betting Control Act is an Act to provide for the establishment of a Betting Control and Licensing Board, for the licensing of bookmakers and betting premises, and for the general improvement of control over bookmaking and betting practices in Zambia. It came into force on 17 January 1958, before independence. The consolidated text published in the Laws of Zambia carries amendments running from 1957 through to 1994, together with government notices from 1964 and a statutory instrument from 1965. The most recent amendment in that consolidation is from 1994.

One further wrinkle. Professional commentary refers to the Betting Control Act as amended by Act No. 50 of 2021. That amendment does not appear in the consolidated text published on the National Assembly’s site, which stops at 1994. Either the consolidation predates the amendment or the reference is to something else; we cannot tell from the public record, and we would rather say so than quietly pick one.

The wider framework sits alongside it rather than inside it: a Lotteries Act, a Pools Act, a Gaming Machines (Prohibition) Act from 1994, and the Casino Act. Different products, different statutes, different eras. What Zambia does not have is a single gambling law, which is why the answer to almost every question about Zambian gambling regulation begins with “it depends which product”.

Who the Board is, and how much discretion it has

The licensing authority is a small ministerial committee, not an agency.

Read those provisions together and the character of the regime is clear. It is administrative and discretionary rather than rules-based and transparent. That is entirely normal for the era in which it was drafted. It is also the reason nothing about the licensing process generates a public record you could consult.

How a licence is actually obtained

The procedure lives in the Betting Control Regulations, and it is a paper procedure from end to end.

1. The applicant submits Form 1, in duplicate, to the Board — addressed, on the statutory form itself, to The Betting Control and Licensing Board, P.O. Box RW62, Lusaka.
2. It must arrive at least forty days before the date on which the applicant wants to start trading.
3. The Board checks the particulars are clear enough and may send the form back for amplification.
4. The Board then advertises the application in the Gazette and one local newspaper, at the applicant’s expense.
5. Anyone who wishes to object has twenty-one days from that advertisement to do so in writing, setting out grounds. The Board forwards any objection to the applicant.
6. At least ten days before the meeting at which the application will be considered, the Board gives notice of that meeting in whatever manner it thinks fit.
7. At the meeting, applicant and objectors may appear in person or by counsel and lead evidence. The Board may take evidence on oath, and the chairman may administer them.
8. The Board decides whether the proceedings, or any part of them, are held in public or in private, at its discretion.
9. A false statement in an application is an offence carrying a fine of up to seven hundred and fifty penalty units or up to three months’ imprisonment.

Notice what that procedure produces and what it does not. It produces a Gazette notice at the application stage, which is a public record of someone applying. It does not produce a published outcome, a list, a licence number lookup or anything else a customer could search two years later. The transparency in the system is front-loaded onto a step almost nobody reads, in a publication almost nobody outside government sees.

The renewal route is the same procedure again, on Form 2, which additionally asks the bookmaker to state the gross turnover of the business over the preceding twelve months.

What the licence document itself says

The statutory form of a Zambian bookmaker’s licence is set out in the Regulations, and reading it tells you more than any summary.

The four-thousand-kwacha security

The Act contains exactly one consumer-protection number, and it has not been revalued in the text published today.

Section 8 requires the Board, in every case where a licence is issued, to impose as a condition that the applicant furnish security — a fidelity bond or other approved security — of not less than four thousand kwacha. The Board is to set the amount having regard to the known scale of the applicant’s business and any expected growth in the coming year, and may vary it later if that scale changes. Form 1 asks the applicant directly whether they are prepared to furnish security of K4,000 or such greater sum as the Board may decide.

The floor is a floor, and the Board can and presumably does set more for a large operator. But the number written into the statute and into the prescribed form is four thousand kwacha, and in the money of 2026 that is roughly the price of a mid-range phone. What that security is for — the mechanism by which it is realised and paid out to customers a bookmaker has failed to pay — is set out in full on our complaints page, because that is where it belongs.

What the Act does not cover

The most useful way to understand a 1958 statute is to look at what it worries about.

That last card is the whole problem in one line, and it is not a rhetorical flourish. The application form asks how many rooms the premises has and which floor it is on. The licence names the precise location and extent of those premises. The offences are framed around a shop with a counter. An online operator serving Zambian customers from a data centre does not fit any of it comfortably, and the Act gives no guidance on how it should.

This is also why the newer legislation had to define its own terms rather than lean on this one. The 2026 betting levy needed the concept of a customer gaming account, so it wrote one; it needed a definition of a betting company, and reached back to this Act for the word “licensed” while supplying everything else itself. The mechanics of that charge are on the betting levy page.

Why there is no register, and what that costs you

Once you have read the procedure, the absence of a register stops being surprising. Nothing in the Act was ever designed to produce one.

The Betting Control and Licensing Board is a statutory body listed under the Ministry of Finance and National Planning, alongside a separate Lotteries Control Board. We could not find a website for it. We could not find a published list of licensees, current or historic. The route the statute provides for reaching it is a postal address on a form. The only public artefact the process generates is a Gazette advertisement of an application, published before any decision is taken.

Even the name is unsettled in secondary sources. The Act calls it the Betting Control and Licensing Board. A major international law-firm guide refers to a Lotteries and Betting Control Board. At least one affiliate site has invented an acronym, LGBZ, which appears in no primary source we have seen. Kenya has a Betting Control and Licensing Board of its own, with the same initials and an actual website, and a good deal of English-language writing about “the BCLB” in an African context is about Kenya rather than Zambia.

What operators claim, and how far each claim can be checked

Here is where each of the sites this guide follows actually stands, with the evidence level attached to every line rather than a badge.

Checking a licence claim yourself

Thirty seconds of looking beats any badge on any review site, including ours.

The reform that has been coming since 2021

None of this is news to the Zambian government, and a replacement has been discussed for years.

In June 2025 Cabinet approved, in principle, the introduction of a Bill to repeal and replace several outdated laws governing betting, lotteries and gaming. The government spokesman framed the problem in exactly the terms this page has described: the industry has grown substantially, with more casinos, lottery operators and betting companies entering the market, while the legal and supervisory framework has remained largely unchanged, and the expansion into online gambling has created regulatory gaps the current framework does not address.

Approval in principle is the beginning of a legislative process, not the end of one. As at the date on this page we have found no enacted replacement, and the 1958 Act with its 1994 amendments remains the licensing law. A consolidated regulator for gaming and lotteries has been an aspiration in Zambian policy statements since at least 2021 without arriving.

Questions people actually ask