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The Theory of Access urges us to redefine access beyond ownership as "the ability to derive benefits from things." Once a user has technology access, many factors enable or limit the user in understanding how to use technology, engage with it to achieve their tasks, and utilize the benefits of technology. "Meaningful use of ICTs" is defined as a stage of the digital divide when the user exercises a degree of control and choice over the technology and its content and the resulting use is useful, fruitful, significant, and has relevance to the individual. In this thesis, I look at the impact of social access and cognitive access in enabling or limiting low-income populations’ ability to access and understand the possibilities of technological systems and users’ ability to learn and fully engage with technological services. I share six research projects that show the impact of gender, family, socioeconomics, socio-cultural norms, and religion impact the social access and supportive actors and user training build user’s cognitive access. Most models of digital inclusion assume physical access as a prerequisite to social access in the form of sociocultural support and cognitive access in terms of users’ understanding. My work shows how users overcome physical access and cognitive access limitations using their social circle. In social access, I describe how social structures and social factors like gender, religion, socioeconomic status, sociocultural setup, and the implementation of social values by families form the social access for low-income users, especially women. I first introduce the "Theory of Readiness" which shows how social readiness, technological readiness, and financial readiness combine to form the basis for users' access and use of digital financial services. Using this theory, I highlight the cultural and social values associated with gender and its impact on women's technological and financial inclusion. I tease apart gender issues from economic issues, by showing social access and gender’s impact across socioeconomic classes. I then present the Technology Engagement Framework to explain the spectrum of access and describe the various actors, their motivations, and roles in a user’s technology engagement journey. My work is the first to draw focus on the impact of religion on technology use. Using the "Technology Engagement Framework," I explain how religious and cultural values are implemented by the family members and impact the form and extent of users' ability to utilize digital services. This work started an important conversation about the religious and cultural values and their impact on human-computer interaction - both on the users and researchers. While social access and its contributing actors are an integral part of users' understanding and use of technologies, the affordances within technological systems and the guidance of users and user training are equally crucial for meaningful use. I share the cognitive access that is enabled or limited by users' social circles and how technologists and trainers try to bridge this cognitive access gap by training as family members at home or as formal trainers at work. Learning from human-mediated training forms a strong foundation for users to derive benefits in the presence and absence of human trainers. The presented works collectively explain the factors impacting the access, understanding, and use of technological and financial services by users in low-resource settings. I argue that future works to design with and design for marginalized communities need to look beyond the classification of haves and have-nots. These nuanced factors will enable conscious reporting of digital divides and our successes in bridging them. When reporting population percentages with access to technology, the theory of readiness, or technology engagement framework can be used to understand what this access looks like and what are the barriers still hindering these users from meaningfully using or engaging with these technologies.