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Botswana’s parliament published the measure as the Gambling (Amendment) Bill, 2026, Bill No. 15 of 2026.
Botswana’s existing gambling framework sets the legal gambling age at 21. The amendment bill would align that threshold with the country’s general age of majority, which is 18.
Supporters of the change argued that people aged 18 to 20 are already treated as adults in many areas of civic and economic life, and that retaining a separate gambling threshold of 21 could push some towards unlicensed sites.
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Ahead of the government’s Autumn Budget in October, Entain CEO Stella David cautioned that doubling the current MGD rate to 40% could result in widespread closures of betting shops and significant job losses, while potentially reducing tax revenues for the government.
A potential MGD rise was first reported in the The Financial Times, as Chancellor John Healey is allegedly looking to raise the tax, on the recommendation of the Social Market Foundation, which proposed the increase in a recent report.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham had already announced the government’s intention to scrap “aim to permit” for betting shops as well as insisting that AGCs will now need planning permission to function.
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“The largest black market operators have scaled to create recognisable brands with traffic that can compare to domestically licensed operators,” the report’s authors wrote. “The top group of sites by common owner has a 12% share of traffic, while the largest single brand has 10%.”
Beyond offering crypto payment solutions, a number of black market operators are licensed in “light touch” offshore jurisidictions which use opaque offshore operating structures to help to obscure company ownership and make local enforcement against these companies complex, the report noted.
By comparison, the long tail of smaller black market sites rely heavily on affiliates to generate traffic.