Crossing the New Digital Divide: Connecting to Mobile Economic Empowerment

A new nationwide poll, “,” identifies a significant gap between African-Americans’ enthusiastic embrace of mobile technology as consumers and the community’s ability to recognize and capitalize on mobile technology as a vital tool for economic empowerment. The survey, conducted for Mobile Future by Cornell Belcher, president of brilliant corners Research & Strategies, surveyed 800 African-Americans nationwide to gain an understanding of why this gap exists and how to create future opportunities for diverse communities.

Some of the survey's findings:

• Progress on Access: 72% say they live in households with three or more connected devices.
• Engaged consumers. A full 79% of respondents say mobile technology makes their lives easier. And, 68% say they use their smartphones frequently—either multiple times a day (43%) or multiple times an hour (25%).
• Lack of Skills/Awareness: A majority (53%) identify lack of skills and low awareness of mobile tech economic opportunities as the biggest barriers to participation.
• Local, Affordable Training Can Help: Low-cost training (47%) offered in communities (31%) and schools (26%) would increase interest in mobile tech careers.
• Significant Gender Gap: African-American women were far less likely to be interested in mobile tech jobs. For example, while 45% of men expressed interest in becoming mobile app developers, just 31% of women said the same.