Ethnic politics and the diffusion of mobile technology in Africa

•Ethnic power-sharing depends on groups' population shares (Francois et al. 2015).•Study on the effect of population shares on mobile phone infrastructure.•Identification strategy exploits artificial drawing of African borders.•Larger ethnic groups have more and better mobile phone infrastructure.•Ethnic power-sharing thus affects the diffusion of mobile technology in Africa.

We analyze the effect of an ethnic group's country-level population share on the mobile phone infrastructure in Africa. Consistent with the African power-sharing arrangements documented by Francois et al. (2015), we find that larger ethnic groups benefit from a higher concentration of mobile phone infrastructure and a higher fraction of UMTS cell sites.