Star Guardians

What is Star Guardians?

One of the founding members of the ARGN is GamblePause Initiative Africa, founded by Ladipo Abiose Akolade.

Akolade said the ARGN was established to address the fragmented nature of responsible gambling efforts across Africa and create a platform for greater collaboration between organisations working in the space.

“ARGN was created because problem gambling is becoming a bigger issue across Africa and most responsible gambling efforts still happen within individual countries,” Akolade tells iGB. “While many organisations are doing great work, there has been limited opportunity to learn from each other, share research, or work together on common challenges.

What is Star Guardians?

Introduced in 1998, ClubGRANTS was designed to channel a share of gambling-linked profits from gaming clubs back into local communities. This includes health and welfare services as well as community development and sporting clubs. 

According to the Gaming Machine Tax Act 2001, a tax rebate of up to 1.85% of a club’s gaming machine profits is made available to any registered club that records profits of over $1 million (US$715,000) during a tax year. 

This is only possible if the club in question allocates at least 0.75% of prescribed profits over $1 million to community-focused activities and services. These profits make up two-thirds of the ClubGRANTS scheme funding. 

About Star Guardians

Candidates from the VVD party urged the government to take a “harder stance” against these big tech platforms.

Van Bruggen told the gambling committee that both Meta and Google were open to maintaining a dialogue with the government on this.

She said the government would receive a report every six months on illegal gambling advertising across these platforms.