Key Points
- Financial gain recorded the highest mean motivation score among 514 Accra adolescent sports bettors, outpacing social and coping motives by a significant margin.
- The Gaming Act 2006, Ghana’s primary gambling legislation, contains no explicit provision addressing addiction or population-level gambling harm, according to a 2026 critical frame analysis.
- The Gaming Commission of Ghana recorded 31 self-exclusion applications in the first quarter of 2025 alone as opposed to 68 in the whole of 2024.
Something shifts when you read the numbers carefully. A new study of 514 senior high school students in Accra, published in Discover Mental Health in August 2026, did not set out to prove that Ghanaian teenagers bet for financial reasons. It set out to test whether three psychometric instruments could reliably measure sports betting behaviour among adolescents. What it found along the way carries a harder edge than the methodology section suggests.
Financial motives recorded the highest mean score of 12.69 among the four motivation dimensions measured. Enhancement motives came in at 10.53, social motives at 8.90, and coping motives at 8.54. That is not a narrow gap between competing motivations. Money sits well above everything else. The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Ghana, Family Health University College, and the Research and Grant Institute of Ghana.
What the Study Measured, and What It Didn’t?
The researchers used the Sport Betting Motives Questionnaire-Financial, adapted from the established Gambling Motives Questionnaire-Financial, to assess motivation across four dimensions. Alongside that, the Problem Sport Betting Severity Index recorded a mean score of 8.10 with a standard deviation of 4.39, indicating that betting-related problems were clearly present within the sample. The Brief Adolescent Sport Betting Screen showed lower internal consistency at a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.67 and failed to demonstrate full measurement invariance across sexes, so the researchers called for further cultural adaptation.
One thing the authors were precise about: this was not a prevalence study. Participants were recruited specifically because they already had a history of sports betting. The findings describe the adolescents included, not all betting youth in Ghana, and not the wider population. That caveat does not soften the financial motivation finding; it actually sharpens it. Within a group selected for active betting behaviour, money as a motive beats everything else, and by a clear margin.
Who the 514 Students Were?
Participants were selected from six public senior high schools in the Accra Metropolitan Area that included two boys’ schools, two girls’ schools, and two mixed schools. Males formed 68.5 per cent of the sample size, while females were 31.5 per cent. Boarders formed 60.9 per cent of the sample size, and 84.8 per cent hailed from urban areas. Notably, 96 per cent of the participants had full or partial access to internet-enabled gadgets. Participants who gambled only through lotteries, forex trading, and internet scamming were not considered.
The authors acknowledged that recruiting exclusively from urban public schools means rural adolescents and private school students are not captured. Future research, they said, should validate the adapted instruments across more diverse populations and examine how emotion-regulation strategies interact with different gambling forms.
A Law That Was Never Written for This Problem
A separate 2026 critical frame analysis of Ghana’s Gaming Act, published in Public Health Challenges, examined what the legislation actually says about gambling harm. Curtin University researcher Emmanuel Badu found the Act frames gambling-related problems primarily through consumer protection and the elimination of illegal activity. The legislation does not explicitly address gambling addiction, and it makes no provision for social or population-level gambling harms. Badu argued the Act requires review and strengthening with a public health focus. The Act prohibits under-18s from gambling and from entering licensed premises, and it requires licensed operators to meet capital and financial requirements, but those provisions were written when the industry looked very different.
Ghana’s online gambling sector grew 24 per cent in 2025, with gross online win reaching approximately $903.5 million, according to iGaming Business. The infrastructure trying to manage that growth, including its harm-reduction architecture, was built for a 2006 market.
Self-Exclusion Numbers Tell Their Own Story
In May 2025, the Gaming Commission held a webinar on gambling, gaming, and mental wellness. Acting Gaming Commissioner Emmanuel Siisi Quainoo confirmed, in remarks published on the Commission’s own website, that the Commission receives at least three self-exclusion requests weekly from individuals struggling with addiction. He also described a case involving a family whose ward was in police custody after borrowing money from multiple people to fund gambling. “This is to say that addiction is very real in gaming and can have devastating impacts if not addressed and handled properly,” he said. The Commission’s own research head, Jonah Asamoah-Nyarko, added that 31 self-exclusion requests arrived in just the first quarter of 2025, compared to 68 for the whole of 2024. That rate of increase, quietly buried in a webinar summary, is the clearest sign yet that Ghana’s current harm-management capacity is being outpaced.
The GFA Acts on One Part of the Problem
Okraku, president of GFA, stated in August 2026 in Prampram during the 32nd Ordinary Congress of the GFA that betting companies are not licensed to place bets on local matches. “None of the betting companies has been licensed to put odds on local games,” said Okraku while emphasising that this is part of their integrity program. The 2026/27 Ghana Premier League season started on 5 September. While the action taken by the GFA is aimed at safeguarding results, it is a completely different issue from the economic factors driving teenagers to mobile betting services.
The Institute of Community Sustainability raised a parallel concern in December 2025. Its Executive Director Eric Jerry Aidoo warned that celebrity endorsements push betting as a pathway to quick financial gain: “It is deeply troubling that radio and television stations are dedicating prime airtime to content that subtly or overtly encourages Ghanaian youth to engage in gambling.” While the Gaming Commission’s advertising guidelines prohibit the use of celebrities in betting promotions, enforcement has visibly weakened, with former footballer Asamoah Gyan hosting a Betway analysis programme that includes betting prompts. The gap between what the guidelines say and what appears on Ghanaian screens is wide enough to need its own policy response.
Expert Analysis
We would argue the most uncomfortable finding in this research is not the financial motivation score itself; it is what the score reveals about how Ghana’s regulatory conversation has been framed. Policymakers and the Gaming Commission have consistently placed gambling harm within a responsible gaming narrative, treating it as a matter of individual behaviour. The study’s data do not support that framing for this population. When financial gain outscores every other motive among betting adolescents in Accra by nearly two points, the question worth asking is not why teenagers lack self-control. It is whether a teenager placing a bet through a mobile app, in a country where youth unemployment pressure is documented and acute, is actually making a rational economic decision inside a system that offers few better alternatives.
That is a more difficult argument to address than addiction messaging, because it requires policy to move beyond licensing conditions and into structural territory. Badu’s critical frame analysis of the Gaming Act points in the same direction, finding that the legislation does not name addiction or population-level harm as explicit regulatory concerns. The Commission’s own data, showing self-exclusion requests nearly doubling in pace, as confirmed in its May 2025 webinar reporting, makes the scale of the gap between legislation and lived reality hard to dismiss. What Ghana needs is a Gaming Act review that explicitly names addiction as a public health matter, not a compliance footnote, alongside the youth employment and financial literacy interventions the researchers themselves recommended. Without that, every school-based screening tool and awareness campaign is working against a current the law was never designed to help reverse.
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