Mobile ownership

Despite the growing use and ownership of cell phones in Colombia, there is still a large digital divide in some areas of the country that prevents everyone to have the same access to mobile devices.

There is a direct relationship between per capita income and access to technologies, that is, the more average income a person has, the more access they will have to ICT and the knowledge they offer. The departments with the most marked digital divide are those in which there are high poverty rates and a large population in rural areas, such as Chocó, Caquetá and Guaviare. Caquetá is, for example, one of the departments in Colombia most affected by violence.

The 2015 MinTIC study related to uses and technology appropriation, shows that Colombians who own a technology device such as a smartphone or computer use them mainly for chatting (54.4 percent), emails (50.7 percent), pictures, profiles, comments and videos (37.7 percent), send or receive compressed files (33.4 percent), watch music videos (32.5 percent) and other uses (13 percent).