Breaking the (perhaps perceived) academic (poverty) cycle
One possibility IMHO is to try to use the Internet to your advantage. In my field (bioinformatics/statistics), there are a few online communities (discussion forums, Twitter) with relatively low barrier of entry. But once in an online community, how do you make useful contact with others - especially those that can &quot;lift you up&quot; (who may easily turn out not to be from the top western universities, but skilled and friendly people from all walks of academia)?
My answer is: be useful. Can you spend some time answering/helping beginners on the forums? Can you proofread and (very politely) suggest improvements to educational materials someone posted? Can you write a tutorial for some tool/technique you've learned? Are there calls for open online collaborations you can join? Can you code and fix bugs/improve documentation in popular open source packages in your field? ... Note that there might be hidden norms on how &quot;good members&quot; of the community should behave and especially if you look foreign it may unfortunately be easy to end up being judged negatively for a good-faith effort - so some social knowledge/skill may be needed.
If the community is healthy (which unfortunately not all communities are), this lets you develop some &quot;currency&quot; in the community and you become more likely to get help yourself when you need it. Once you are not a &quot;nobody&quot;, you are more likely to succeed when you ask some members of the community explicitly for mentorship or for consulting and becoming a co-author on your upcoming paper or for joining a multi-lab effort to collect a larger sample of subjects for a study. And if it fails (and it can fail), your effort made the world a better place and that's also not nothing.
My experience with this approach is that being the first person to enter a subfield (Bayesian statistics) at a somewhat lower-prestige Central European institution with basically zero contacts, it was not that hard to get (over a few years) into productive contact with some of the top researchers in the subfield while only attending a single in-person event - you are definitely facing a tougher &quot;prestige gradient&quot; than me and being white and having a western-sounding name surely made my life easier, so my advice may not apply to you or may not apply completely. I still hope it is a useful suggestion and I believe it is actionable even with relatively low resources.
Also my field is less dependent on expensive equipment/reagents/... so keeping up with the top research is easier. And all of this requires quite a lot of time, which you might not have.
You are facing a tough challenge but I hope you succeed!
P.S.: One thing I don't want to suggest is to &quot;compete for attention&quot; of prestigious colleagues. This is IMHO both unhealthy and unlikely to work well. Instead, I think there are many ways in which a good-faith effort to help the scientific community in your subfield can help your career/connections as a side effect. This is a game many can play and all can win without somebody losing.