Francophone Africa: the opportunity English speaking affiliates are missing

Africa’s iGaming affiliate conversation tends to follow the same script: South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya. It makes sense – they’re the biggest, the loudest and the most covered markets. In recent years, the Portuguese markets (Angola and Mozambique) have also become very attractive for affiliates.

But the overlooked opportunity is Francophone Africa - not because it’s “easy”, but because it’s still comparatively underserved. Less saturation means lower acquisition costs, less SEO competition and far more room for affiliates to build genuine authority.

Why Francophone Africa, and why now?

Francophone Africa is not one market, but a group of fast-growing mobile-first countries, where sports betting is highly culturally embedded, demographics skew young and football dominates.

So why has it been overlooked? The main reasons are, of course, language barriers, unfamiliar operators, poorly marketed affiliate programmes and general lack of knowledge about these markets.

But, with fewer publishers willing to do the hard work, first movers can build defensible positions: local rankings, community presence and brand recognition that becomes very difficult to unseat later.

Start with the right countries

One of the biggest mistakes affiliates and operators make in Africa is assuming the continent can be approached as a single unified market. Francophone Africa is not the same – don’t try and approach it as a whole.

Here are just some of the markets and their estimated populations. They are massive!

• Senegal: 19 million
• Cameroon: 29 million
• DRC: 110 million
• Mali: 23 million
• Ivory Coast: 31 million
• Guinea: 15 million

Of course, population size alone doesn’t tell you everything about a market. They each have their own cultural leanings, mobile money providers, and when it comes to iGaming, their own complex regulations, leading operators and marketing opportunities.

The best market entry strategy is not to launch a Francophone “campaign”. Rather, pick one or two markets and focus your energy and efforts on those. In Africa, volume is key and it takes time to drive significantly enough volume of players to start seeing a material return. But which markets to choose?

The way we approach markets is to find the ones that have the least barriers to entry and allow us to focus on our core business of player acquisition.

The first thing we ask is: which of our current operator partners are working in one or more of these Francophone countries? It’s much easier launching in an unknown market with a known partner, as it removes the incorrect stats or the concern of “will I be paid”, allowing you to focus on simply driving traffic. 

We would like to launch in a market where we have at least two known partners.

Second, we look at brand concentration differential, or how concentrated brand attention is at the top of a market. If a market is completely dominated by one to three brands at the top, and your partner is not in that group, it is going to be a tough test to launch. I am not saying affiliates shouldn’t work with operators who are not dominant, but rather, for the initial market entry, focus your efforts on leading brands – you want to maximise the chance of success for the trial, so you can then reinvest those earnings and effort into growing in the market.  

Partners first, market second

In emerging regions, operator selection can make or break your business. The best operators for Francophone Africa aren’t always the biggest global brands, but the leading brands that do the basics exceptionally well. 

Here are what we look at: 

• Local payment rails and smooth payout processes
• French-speaking support and market-specific promos
• Responsive affiliate management and consistent reporting

Once we have examined these, we look at the other variables to start building our business plan for the market, including the size of the market, average deposit and average FTD %.

Affiliates will quickly learn that the winners are not the ones with the most translated pages, but those who feel local. Deep dive into the market requires effort, which is why affiliates should only launch in one or two markets initially.  

SEO matters, but community wins the long game

This principle is not only applicable to the Francophone market, but to all markets. It is the only way to ensure longevity of your affiliate business.

Francophone Africa still offers SEO opportunities, particularly for country-specific intent keywords and combinations of operators and payment methods. But relying on organic search alone is risky since SERPs will become crowded. Users will potentially move to other search options like ChatGPT or Tiktok too, and it is not a sustainable strategy to become a pure referral partner. 

You need to use SEO to drive the pure acquisitions, but at the same time build up your “owned media” on Facebook, Whatsapp, X, Push notifications and even SMS in some markets. These will become your moat.

Francophone Africa is still early enough for affiliates to build meaningful market positions. But competition will arrive, SEO will tighten, and acquisition costs will rise. The real opportunity is not just being early. It’s doing the hard work of localisation.