Guinea-Bissau Online Casino Guide

Legal casino gambling age in Guinea-Bissau

Published by Casino News Daily editorial teamReviewed byFilip RadulovicOur editorial approach

Guinea-Bissau is a small, Portuguese-speaking state on the West African coast and a member of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA, from its French name). Its gambling sector is thinly regulated and poorly documented. No consolidated modern gambling statute, online licensing regime or published register of operators could be identified in publicly accessible sources. The most authoritative recent description of the sector comes from an anti-money laundering assessment, which records that the Ministry of Tourism grants gaming licences for casinos and that the few licensed casinos were not operating when assessors visited in 2021. Regional anti-money laundering (AML) law, shared with the other UEMOA states, imposes customer identification and record-keeping duties on casinos, including internet casinos, and on gaming providers. This guide sets out what can be verified, what cannot, and what that means for operators and players.

Key points

No dedicated, publicly accessible gambling act or decree for Guinea-Bissau could be located; laws are published in the national Boletim Oficial, which is not systematically available online.
According to the GIABA mutual evaluation report, the Ministry of Tourism is responsible for granting gaming licences for casinos and for supervising their AML compliance; the few licensed casinos were not operational at the time of the 2021 on-site visit.
No licensing regime for online casinos or online betting was identified, and no official blocklist of unlicensed websites or payment blocking measures was found.
Law No. 3/2018 transposes the UEMOA uniform AML law, which treats casinos, including internet casinos, and gaming providers, including national lotteries, as reporting entities.
No national self-exclusion scheme, gambling helpline or published gaming tax schedule could be identified.
A military takeover on 26 November 2025 suspended the constitutional order; a one-year transition charter was published in December 2025.

Last reviewed: 13 October 2026.

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Historical development

Guinea-Bissau was a Portuguese colony until the 1970s. On 24 September 1973 the liberation movement’s National People’s Assembly, meeting in its first session at Boé, unanimously approved the first constitution of the republic. Today the country uses the West African CFA franc and is a member of UEMOA, whose common central bank is the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO).

The legal system reflects this history. A questionnaire on the Guinea-Bissau legal system published on ConstitutionNet describes it as Romano-Germanic in origin, “in the Portuguese version”, and notes that the Civil Code and the Code of Civil Procedure of the 1960s “are still in force, with few amendments”. Custom is recognised as a source of law within the Civil Code, and customary rules operate in practice as a parallel system. In a civil law system of this kind, the primary sources are written codes and statutes rather than judicial precedent, so the absence of a specific gambling statute is significant: there is no body of case law that fills the gap.

There is little documented history of organised gambling in Guinea-Bissau, and no official statistics on the sector have been published. A directory maintained by LCB (part of this site’s own network) reports that gaming machines known locally as “Colos Colos” appeared in 2017 and that in 2019 the Secretary of State for Tourism imposed a ban on games of chance, stating that they were operating outside legal norms and that minors were taking part. That account could not be checked against an official publication or the ban order itself, and it should be read as an unverified secondary report.

Legal framework

National legislation

No consolidated gambling law for Guinea-Bissau could be identified. Searches of available legal sources did not locate a statute or decree setting out licence categories, fees, technical standards, player protection rules or rules on remote gambling. National laws and decrees are published in the Boletim Oficial, the official gazette, but its back issues are not systematically available online, so the existence of older or sector-specific instruments cannot be excluded. Any operator considering the market would need to obtain the relevant texts directly from the authorities in Bissau.

What can be verified is the administrative allocation of responsibility. Table 1.1 of the GIABA mutual evaluation report lists the Ministry of Tourism as responsible for “granting of gaming licenses, namely for the opening and operations of casinos”, and for supervising the compliance of licensees with their money laundering prevention obligations. In other words, casino licensing is treated as a tourism matter, granted by ministerial decision rather than under a dedicated statutory licensing regime of the kind found in the Czech Republic or South Africa.

Regional AML law

The most detailed rules that apply to gambling come from regional law. UEMOA adopted Directive No. 02/2015/CM/UEMOA on combating money laundering and terrorist financing on 2 July 2015, together with a model uniform law that each member state enacts nationally. The GIABA report states that Guinea-Bissau did so through AML/CFT Law No. 3/2018. The model uniform law published by the BCEAO contains several provisions relevant to gambling (article numbers below refer to the model text):

Scope. Article 1 lists “casinos, including internet casinos” among the designated non-financial businesses and professions (DNFBPs), and Article 5 extends the law to “providers of games of chance and money”, “including national lotteries”.
Identification thresholds. Article 29 sets a threshold of one million CFA francs for gaming operators, against ten million for most other occasional transactions.
Casino duties. Article 44 requires casinos to keep regular accounts for ten years, to verify the identity of players who buy, bring or exchange chips or plaques above the threshold, to record those transactions chronologically in a register kept for ten years after the last recorded operation, and to log transfers of funds between casinos and gaming clubs chronologically.
Reporting. Article 15 requires DNFBPs, including casinos, to report cash transactions above a threshold fixed by BCEAO instruction to the national financial intelligence unit.

These obligations apply whether or not a national gambling statute exists. They do not, however, create a right to operate: a gambling business still needs whatever authorisation national law requires.

Regulator and licensing model

Gambling regulation can be organised as a monopoly (one state-owned or state-appointed operator has exclusive rights), a licensing system (any qualifying operator may obtain a licence on published conditions), or a prohibition. A related model is the concession, in which the state grants one private company exclusive rights for a fixed period in return for fees or a share of revenue.

Guinea-Bissau does not fit neatly into any of these categories, because the governing rules are not published in an accessible form. The available evidence points to discretionary administrative licensing by the Ministry of Tourism for casinos. According to the GIABA report, the authorities told assessors that “the few licensed casinos in the country were not operational”, and a footnote adds that casinos “though exist but are non-operational at the time of onsite”. The report does not give the number of licences, their holders, their duration or the fees paid, and no official register of licensees could be found.

For lotteries and sports betting, no official source could be located that establishes a state lottery operator, a statutory betting monopoly or the terms of any exclusive concession. Reports that sports betting has been conceded to a private company could not be verified against a government decision, a published contract or reputable trade press, so they are not relied on here. Readers should treat claims about exclusive rights in Guinea-Bissau with caution unless they are backed by a text published in the Boletim Oficial.

The weakness of supervision has been documented. GIABA found that Guinea-Bissau had “yet to designate an AML/CFT oversight authority for the DNFBP sector”, that no AML/CFT inspections had been carried out in DNFBPs, and that, in the absence of supervision, no sanction had been applied to them. It rated the country non-compliant with FATF Recommendation 28, which concerns the regulation and supervision of DNFBPs including casinos. The report concluded that the country had “implemented an AML/CFT system with a low level of effectiveness in all areas”. The report treats casinos as facing lower money laundering and terrorist financing risks and gives them less attention; as noted above, the few licensed casinos were not operating at the time of the assessment.

Online gambling

No legal framework for online gambling could be identified. There is no published licence category for online casinos, online sports betting or online lotteries, and no authority has published a list of authorised or unauthorised websites. Equally, no provision was found that expressly prohibits residents from using foreign gambling websites. The online position is therefore best described as unregulated: neither licensed nor clearly prohibited.

Many jurisdictions enforce their gambling laws online through blocking, meaning directions to internet service providers to prevent access to unlicensed sites, and through payment blocking, which instructs banks and payment providers to refuse transactions with such operators. No evidence of either measure in Guinea-Bissau was found, and the LCB directory (part of this site’s own network) states that the country does not block gambling websites aimed at local users. No rules on gambling advertising were identified.

Payments are a practical constraint. The GIABA report describes the economy as “largely cash-based with a high informality index”. Mobile money, in which electronic money is stored on an account linked to a mobile phone number, has grown but from a low base. The Making Finance Work for Africa country profile reports that more than 246,551 mobile money accounts had been created in under ten years of service, that only 10.4% of accounts were active in 2016 according to the BCEAO’s 2016 report on mobile financial services, and that mobile money transactions were below 1% of GDP in 2016. More recent official figures for Guinea-Bissau alone could not be located.

Because the uniform AML law expressly covers internet casinos, an online operator based in Guinea-Bissau would in principle fall within the AML regime. In practice, with no designated supervisor and no licensing route, the obligations are not monitored.

Position of players

No provision was found that makes it an offence for an individual to gamble, whether at a land-based venue or with a foreign online operator, and no recorded prosecutions or fines of players were identified. That does not mean that playing is expressly authorised. It means only that the sources examined do not establish a player offence. Because the underlying legislation is not fully accessible, the position cannot be stated with certainty.

A minimum age of 18 for lotteries and other gambling is reported by the LCB directory (part of this site’s own network), but the legal instrument setting it could not be identified and the figure should be treated as unverified. As in most jurisdictions, minors should be presumed to be excluded.

Players who use foreign websites should understand the practical consequences of the absence of a local regulator. There is no national body to receive complaints, no dispute resolution service, no local enforcement of fair-play standards and no guarantee that player funds are protected. Any recourse would depend on the rules of the jurisdiction in which the operator is licensed, if it is licensed at all. Large cash transactions at a casino would trigger identity checks under the AML law described above.

Taxation

No gaming-specific tax schedule for Guinea-Bissau could be identified. Gambling taxes elsewhere are commonly levied on gross gaming revenue (GGR), meaning the amount staked by players less the winnings paid out, or on turnover, the total amount staked. Neither type of levy could be confirmed for Guinea-Bissau, and no official figures on gambling revenue or tax receipts were found.

Licensed operators would be subject to the general tax system, including corporate income tax, and any licence fees fixed in their individual authorisations. No source was found addressing the tax treatment of players’ winnings. Operators and players with specific questions should consult the tax administration in Bissau or a locally qualified adviser.

Consumer protection and responsible gambling

No national self-exclusion register, operator-funded treatment programme or dedicated gambling helpline could be identified for Guinea-Bissau. The only binding rules found that bear on player protection are the customer identification and record-keeping duties of the UEMOA AML law, which are designed to prevent financial crime rather than gambling harm, and which the GIABA report found were not supervised in the DNFBP sector.

In the absence of local services, people concerned about their own gambling or that of a family member may use the tools offered by individual operators, such as deposit limits, time-outs and account closure, and international support organisations. General guidance is available in our responsible gambling guide.

Recent and upcoming developments

AML assessment. GIABA’s second-round mutual evaluation of Guinea-Bissau, based on an on-site visit in early 2021, and adopted by GIABA’s plenary in February 2022, rated effectiveness as low in all areas and called for AML/CFT supervisors with inspection and sanctioning powers to be appointed for all DNFBPs, beginning with the high-risk ones. Progress on designating a supervisor for casinos and gaming could not be confirmed.
FATF status. Guinea-Bissau does not appear on the FATF’s list of jurisdictions under increased monitoring published on 19 June 2026, nor on its list of high-risk jurisdictions subject to a call for action (see the FATF’s black and grey lists page). Côte d’Ivoire, another UEMOA state, remains on the increased monitoring list.
Military takeover (November 2025). According to International IDEA’s Democracy Tracker, the Military High Command seized power on 26 November 2025, suspending the electoral process that followed the presidential election of 23 November. A transition charter published on 4 December 2025 provides for a one-year transition, a 65-member National Transition Council acting as the legislature, and presidential and legislative elections at its end. ECOWAS rejected the transition plan on 14 December 2025 and threatened targeted sanctions.
Outlook for gambling reform. No gambling bill, decree or consultation was identified for the period 2023 to 2026. Any future regulation would, during the transition, pass through the National Transition Council or be adopted by decree. No such step had been confirmed as of October 2026.

Casino listings for players in Guinea-Bissau

The listings below are generated automatically from our casino database. They do not show that an operator is licensed or authorised in Guinea-Bissau, which has no licensing regime for online casinos and no published register of operators. The legal position of online gambling is unregulated rather than clearly lawful, so the listings must not be read as an indication that operating or playing is permitted under Guinea-Bissau law.

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Guinea-Bissau Online Casino Guide

Key points

Online casinos for Guinea-Bissau

Historical development

Legal framework

National legislation

Regional AML law

Regulator and licensing model

Online gambling

Position of players

Taxation

Consumer protection and responsible gambling

Recent and upcoming developments

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