IGHAC provides the advisory architecture: research, standards, and professional capacity. Governments, employers, and practitioners need a credible, independent body to lead this conversation.
Gambling harm does not stay in one jurisdiction. It crosses borders, sectors, and generations. IGHAC advances three interconnected mandates to build the response it deserves.
IGHAC commissions, coordinates, and publishes independent research on gambling harm prevalence, impact, and intervention effectiveness. Outputs are peer-reviewable, methodology-disclosed, and published openly. No participant, donor or partner sees a finding before the public does.
Research ProgrammeWe develop evidence-based advisory standards for gambling harm identification, screening, and workplace response. These frameworks translate research into operational guidance that practitioners, HR functions, and regulators can use.
Member PlatformIGHAC builds practitioner capacity through structured training, certification pathways, and international peer networks. The people addressing gambling harm in workplaces and clinics deserve professional standards equal to any other health discipline.
How to participateGambling harm does not belong to one industry or one professional discipline. IGHAC's advisory mandate spans the full chain of people and institutions that affect outcomes: from the clinic to the boardroom, the campus to the courtroom.
HR practitioners, EAP providers, and employers need evidence and structured frameworks for identifying and responding to gambling harm within their workforce. IGHAC produces the standards and trains the professionals who implement them.
Psychiatrists, psychologists, addiction counsellors, and occupational health practitioners require a locally validated clinical evidence base and professional development framework. IGHAC bridges international research and African clinical practice.
National gambling authorities, parliamentary research offices, and public health departments require independent, credible data for regulatory design, policy development, and legislative reform. IGHAC is built specifically to serve that need.
Universities, research councils, and individual researchers in addiction, public health, behavioural economics, and regulatory policy need a collaborative infrastructure for producing, validating, and publishing gambling harm evidence in Africa and beyond.
Harm reduction organisations, financial counselling services, and community development bodies work with the populations most affected by gambling harm. IGHAC translates research into guidance that civil society organisations can implement directly.
East Africa's mobile-first economy has produced a gambling harm profile with no international precedent. Platforms integrated into mobile money systems require dedicated research and policy frameworks. IGHAC is building both.
IGHAC holds a clear position: gambling harm is too important to leave to the industry, too complex to address without evidence, and too costly to treat as a personal failing.
IGHAC accepts no funding from gambling operators or their representative bodies. Independence is the foundation of credibility. An advisory body funded by the industry it advises on cannot give the advice the sector actually needs.
Our outputs are anchored in independently validated screening instruments: the Problem Gambling Severity Index, the DSM-5 criteria for gambling disorder, and SBIRT. Where IGHAC maps between instruments, the mapping is IGHAC's own and is not presented as validated until it has been tested and published. We do not publish positions unsupported by data, and we challenge data we believe is flawed regardless of its source.
IGHAC's mandate is international and its standards are written to be transferable. Its first studies are fielded in South Africa, because a standard should be proven somewhere before it is offered anywhere. IGHAC does not describe a research interest in another jurisdiction as an operation in it.
IGHAC is a Non-Profit Company under the Companies Act 71 of 2008. Board decisions are documented. Financial records are auditable. No seat, vote or governance access is available for purchase at any level. Transparency is built into the structure, not claimed after the fact.
South African and international research makes the case for independent advisory infrastructure. These are the figures IGHAC exists to address.
Most gambling harm advisory bodies are either industry-funded, jurisdiction-limited, or focused narrowly on regulation. IGHAC occupies a different position.
The first formal advisory NPC in South Africa dedicated exclusively to gambling harm intelligence: no operator funding, no regulatory mandate conflict, no jurisdiction ceiling.
One of the nine board seats is reserved for a person with direct lived experience of gambling harm, who will chair a Council of four to eight members with its position tabled at every board meeting. The seat is not yet filled. It is a seat, not a consultation, and IGHAC will not describe it as occupied before it is.
IGHAC's instruments are built on twenty years of practice and are progressing through formal psychometric validation. Until the Clinical and Public Health seat is filled and that work is complete, no IGHAC instrument is presented as clinically validated. Most bodies do not draw this line. IGHAC does.
Nine-seat board, six seats independent by design. Documented decisions. Published annual report. Three seats are filled today and IGHAC says so on its About page rather than leaving it to be found.
Purpose-built workplace assessment infrastructure provides the data layer. Members access structured findings and evidence, not just reports.
IGHAC does not exist to document harm. It exists to reduce it. Every research output, standard, and training module is oriented toward measurable outcome improvement.
Participation is open to organisations, professional bodies, practitioners, NGOs and academic institutions. There are no tiers and no seat is for sale. Gambling operators, operator trade associations and operator-funded bodies cannot participate on any basis.
Universities · regulators · EAPs · clinical practices · HR consultancies · training providers · technology partners · international NGOs. If you work in gambling harm research, workforce wellbeing, or behavioural policy, there is a place for you in this work.