By Dr Emily Crick and Professor Agnes Nairn
Agnes Nairn, Hub Co-Director, and Emily Crick, Hub Research Development Associate joined representatives from the following institutions for a rich and stimulating 2 day workshop in Nairobi, Kenya.
- University of Namibia, Namibia – Dr Albert Shikongo
- Makerere University, Uganda – Dr Branco Sekalegga and Dr David Kakeeto
- Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science and Technology, Kenya – Dr Gregory Jumah Nyongesa and Professor Pamela Raburu
- Unified Initiative for Drug Free Nigeria/Arizona State University, Nigeria – Daniel Ikenna Molobe
- University of Cape Town, University of South Africa, South Africa – Dr Caitlin Ferreira and Dr Jeandri Robertson
All of these researchers have either been funded by the Hub or are working with Hub researchers and our mission was to work together on developing a Pan-African gambling harms research network. In line with the complexity of gambling harms, the researchers’ disciplines and methodologies ranged from Performing Arts, Marketing, Education and Public Policy to Mathematical Modelling. More details can be found about the funded projects here: Kenya, Uganda, Namibia, Nigeria. The South Africa project is a replication of Bristol projects on the volume of broad cast gambling messaging during cricket, rugby and football.
The workshop was supported by the Perivoli Africa Research Centre (PARC) at the University of Bristol, a Research Development International Collaboration Award from the University of Bristol and the Bristol Hub for Gambling Harms Research.
The network will be grounded firmly in the principles of the Africa Charter, an Africa-centred framework for advancing a transformative mode of research collaborations between the Global North and Africa and is a PARC Pathfinder Project – designed to put the charter principles into action.
Over the course of two intense days together, involving a lot of flip charts and post-it notes, we co-created objectives for the network.
To support high quality Africa-centred gambling harms research collaborations
- between University of Bristol (and other global North institutions) and partners across the African continent
- between African partners
To provide mutual support and capacity building in
- building a career in gambling harms research
- novel gambling harms research designs
- conducting multi-disciplinary research
- working with non-academic partners
- writing academic papers
- disseminating findings to lay audiences
- working with impact stakeholders including policy makers, regulators and community groups
- understanding how to use research to influence governments
We explored the commonalities and divergences in how gambling is represented and understood across our countries and agreed that local, cultural understanding is paramount to help tailor local interventions to prevent gambling harms.
Whilst each African project is very different, three strikingly common features emerged from our discussions.
- Gambling harms are escalating extremely fast across the continent partly because online betting (particularly on sports) has become easily accessible by mobile phone
- There is a severe paucity of research on gambling harms in Africa
- There are also two very important policy issues/tensions:
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- Gambling brings much needed economic contribution to regions and nations. So, policy makers can be reluctant to regulate too heavily.
- Gambling operators are global giants with enormous marketing, IT and legal budgets. Regulators are national or even regional. They are ill-equipped to protect citizens from harm. So, it is hard for willing policy makers to keep up with the activities of gambling operators – particularly in the light of lack of understand of scale and scope of gambling harms.
The policy impact of gambling harms research will therefore be a very important part of our network.
We also discussed that whilst the tensions experienced by policy and public health officials in the face of escalating gambling harms are common across the world, most of the research has been done in the global North: Australia, UK, USA, Europe. One of the challenges for the network will be to ensure that research conducted in the continent is genuinely Africa centred across all areas of the Africa Charter. As a funder, the Hub has an opportunity to put into practice Charter principles that apply to funders.
The group also agreed to replicate the Kenyan study on gambling harms amongst students in Nigeria, Uganda, South Africa, Namibia and UK. We are following up our exciting discussions online over the next couple of months and a grant from the Bristol Collegiate Research Society means we can all meet again in Bristol to take forward the network and our new research project. This coincides with the Colloquium on 16th October.