The thinking is long term. You have a large segment of your population that is economically underutilized. Getting more of them educated in this generation will help even more get educated in the next generation until eventually, you don't have this drain on your economic output caused by hundreds of years of discrimination.
The problem of undereducated doctors has always existed because only an already wealthy and historically advantaged few could go through the process of medical education without their family starving. After a few generations, doctors will be drawn from a much larger pool, and the ones who make it will be of higher quality.
That sounds good in theory but there are a plethora of jobs that the general category people can't get now, there's no way this is equality. I didn't do a good job explaining the situation it was just an overview, I'd be okay with this but in practise this is really harmful and will go on because they hold the votes.
Who said anything about equality? The goal is to become a developed country with broad access to healthcare and economic access, which will lead to faster scientific development that benefits everybody. The fastest way to get that is not to help the already wealthy a little but to help the people disadvantaged merely due to accident of birth a lot. More equality is a relatively inconsequential side benefit.
You could either make yourself slightly wealthier now and die with all the other wealthy people with today's life expectancy, or you could live significantly longer by increasing the number of people who participate in economic and scientific development.
There might be problems in the implementation of those programs, and that's what you should focus on fixing; however, the general idea is obviously correct to any logical long term thinker.
The problem of undereducated doctors has always existed because only an already wealthy and historically advantaged few could go through the process of medical education without their family starving. After a few generations, doctors will be drawn from a much larger pool, and the ones who make it will be of higher quality.