Purpose: The aim of this paper is to review the extent to which the institutional weakness of the Mexican state has impeded the poor from appropriating technology to obtain a sustained income in the labour market in order to overcome poverty through their own efforts. Methodology: The methodological design of our research was sequential-exploratory and entailed a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods. Results: The results show that the institutional weakness of the Mexican state impedes people from appropriating ICTs to expand their opportunities to obtain a sustained income in the labour market in order to overcome poverty through their own efforts. Limitations: The main limitation in this study is that we collected data in only one state of the Mexican Republic. Main findings: The questionnaire we applied to ex-recipients of the anti-poverty policy Prospera has an acceptable confidence level to be able to make generalizations about the labour conditions of the poor people who are aged between eighteen and twenty-nine and completed high school in the state of Aguascalientes.