Personally know of 1 from Ghana and 1 from Nigeria - both engineers in HFT - both emigrated to the US post-college - so not that rare. Is it proportional to population? Of course not. Clearly there's going to be an english-speaking bias and an education availability bias and whatever bias du jour one wants to bake in. I don't think it is controversial to say that being born into poverty hurts - as naively as just accounting for malnutrition, for example, and going from there...