Governments and institutions cannot make effective decisions about gambling harm without credible, independent, locally relevant data. IGHAC's research programme is built specifically to close that gap and to put evidence directly in the hands of those who can act on it.
What we already know about gambling harm in South Africa and the region is enough to justify urgent, coordinated action. What we do not yet know is where most of IGHAC's research energy is focused.
IGHAC distinguishes between what it is doing and what it believes needs doing, because a research programme and a research agenda are different things and conflating them is how organisations overstate their capacity.
Study 1, the South African Gambling Advertising Audit. A content analysis of gambling marketing across sport broadcast, sports news, radio and social media over a defined measurement window, coded for volume, placement, content and compliance with the Advertising Regulatory Board Gambling Advertising Code. Replicates a published international method. Fieldwork in Q4 2026, report Q1 2027. No ethics approval required and no external funding required.
Study 2, the Deceptive Design Audit. A structured audit of the leading South African betting platforms against the published international taxonomy of sludge, dark patterns and dark nudges, with a licensed and unlicensed comparison and inter-rater reliability reported. The taxonomy has never been applied to an African market. Report targeted for Q4 2026.
Both studies are pre-registered before data collection, and both publish their instrument and dataset alongside the finding. The remaining nine areas below are IGHAC's published research agenda: the gaps IGHAC has identified and intends to address as capacity, funding and academic partnerships allow. They are not claimed as work in progress. The full agenda, with study designs, sampling, indicative costs and funding routes, is available on request from the research contact.
South Africa has no nationally representative, methodologically sound gambling harm prevalence study. What data exists is fragmented, industry-funded, or geographically limited. East Africa has almost none. Without a credible baseline, every subsequent policy decision is an estimate.
Gambling harm has a documented impact on workforce productivity, absenteeism, presenteeism, and financial decision-making. In South Africa, employer obligations in this space are undefined. No jurisdiction in Sub-Saharan Africa has a workplace gambling harm standard. IGHAC is developing both the evidence base and the policy framework to address this gap.
Mobile and online gambling has substantially lowered the age of first exposure across Sub-Saharan Africa and East Africa. The neurological vulnerability of adolescents to addictive behaviour is well documented internationally but almost entirely unstudied in South African and East African populations. The educational and social pathways through which young people are being drawn into harmful gambling behaviour are not understood.
In the South African context, gambling harm does not occur in isolation from broader financial vulnerability. The intersection with micro-lending, informal credit, and debt stress creates a harm profile distinct from Western research populations. The household economic impact of problem gambling in low-to-middle income contexts is significantly underresearched and misrepresented in policy conversations.
East Africa's mobile-first economy has created a gambling harm profile with no direct international precedent. Betting platforms integrated into mobile money systems (including M-PESA and similar) have dramatically reduced friction to gambling participation, particularly for young, economically active adults. The harm patterns, escalation speeds, and intervention points in this environment are not yet documented.
Most evidence on gambling disorder treatment comes from Western clinical populations. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) frameworks and motivational interviewing protocols designed for those contexts may require significant adaptation for South African and East African clinical populations, where social, economic, and cultural factors differ substantially. The current absence of efficacy data means clinicians are implementing programmes without an evidence base for local effectiveness.
IGHAC's Harm Escalation Continuum (HEC) framework provides a structured model for understanding how gambling behaviour moves from recreational to harmful to disordered. HEC is published as an advisory framework and has not yet completed psychometric validation. Validating it against clinical and population data is planned work, not completed work, and it begins with the South African re-validation of the Problem Gambling Severity Index, which supplies the criterion measure HEC needs. Until that is done, HEC is a common vocabulary for describing a harm pathway and is not an instrument for clinical referral or diagnosis.
Comparative analysis of gambling regulatory frameworks across South Africa, Kenya, the United Kingdom, and Ireland provides a unique opportunity to understand what regulatory design choices actually reduce harm outcomes. South Africa's National Gambling Board has faced significant governance challenges. Ireland has recently established an independent regulator under the Gambling Regulation Act 2024. The UK's Gambling Act 2005 reform process is ongoing. These parallel developments create a natural comparative research environment.
Gambling harm research internationally has historically focused on male populations in high-income settings. Women, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds experience gambling harm differently, escalate through different pathways, and are less well served by existing intervention frameworks. In the South African context, these differentials are compounded by structural inequalities that amplify harm and reduce help-seeking behaviour.
IGHAC research is not produced for academic consumption alone. Every study is designed with a specific decision-maker in mind: a regulator who needs data to draft rules, an employer who needs a framework to build policy, a clinician who needs evidence to adapt practice.
Independent, evidence-based research outputs that can be tabled in parliamentary committees, cited in regulatory impact assessments, and used to evaluate the effectiveness of existing frameworks without relying on operator-funded research.
Structured, workplace-specific evidence that enables organisations to understand their exposure to gambling harm among their workforce, develop internal policies grounded in evidence, and access a referral pathway to professional support.
Locally generated clinical evidence that gives addiction medicine practitioners, psychologists, and counsellors the data they need to adapt international treatment frameworks for African populations and to make the case for dedicated gambling harm services within health systems. Validation status is stated for every instrument, and no instrument is described as clinically validated until that work is complete and the Clinical and Public Health seat is filled.
IGHAC's research programme is organised into four arms, each led by a board director with domain expertise. Three founding directors are in place and no independent seat has yet been filled. Six independent seats are open, four of them matched directly to these research arms. Each open chair represents a defined area of research leadership that IGHAC is actively seeking to fill.
IGHAC requires a director with a formal academic research background to lead the evidence production agenda, anchor the NRF funding application, and serve as the primary institutional liaison for university research partnerships. This director will oversee the prevalence study design, the clinical validation programme, and IGHAC's peer-reviewed publication pipeline.
A clinician with direct experience in addiction medicine, clinical psychology, or occupational health is needed to lead the clinical dimensions of IGHAC's research programme. This director will guide the design of the HEC clinical validation study, provide clinical oversight of IGHAC's intervention guidance, and build relationships with health systems and clinical training institutions within IGHAC's research scope.
IGHAC needs a director with deep experience in public policy, regulatory design, or government engagement to lead its regulatory research programme and to position IGHAC as a credible input source for legislative processes in South Africa, Kenya, the UK, and Ireland. This director will manage parliamentary submissions, regulatory consultation responses, and relationships with national gambling regulatory bodies.
The international dimensions of IGHAC's mandate require a director with operational experience in international advisory, NGO governance, or cross-border research coordination. This director will lead IGHAC's expansion into East African and European jurisdictions, manage international partnership development, and provide strategic oversight of research programmes specific to digital gambling harm in mobile-first economies.
IGHAC's research is not siloed. Every study connects to at least one of three framework pillars, ensuring that evidence production, standards development, and capacity building reinforce each other rather than operating in parallel.
Original research that fills the gaps in the current evidence base: prevalence studies, clinical validation, cross-jurisdictional comparisons, and longitudinal tracking of harm outcomes. Findings are published openly and are not held behind participation. Working files and datasets are deposited in the IGHAC Research Vault, open to collaborators on a study under its agreed protocol, and datasets are published alongside findings wherever ethics approval permits.
Translating evidence into actionable frameworks for regulators, employers, clinicians and community organisations. IGHAC's framework outputs sit between raw research and implementation.
These are IGHAC advisory frameworks in active use. They are not trademark-registered and carry no trademark symbol. None has yet completed independent psychometric validation, and none may be used as the basis for a clinical diagnosis or referral decision.
Building the professional infrastructure to implement what the research recommends. Training, certification, and professional development programmes that give HR practitioners, clinicians, EAP providers, and policy analysts the knowledge and tools to act on IGHAC's evidence base.
IGHAC is actively seeking research collaborators, clinical partners, and policy experts. If your work intersects with any of the nine priority areas above, contact us directly to discuss how collaboration could work.