Social policies are not neutral. Built to support the development and political stability of a country, they may, under an outside influence, act negatively on the economic growth. Emerging economies are particularly affected by this problem. In fact, social policies are often dependent on ODA offered by international donors, whose governing bodies are rarely independent of country’s economic models on which they depend. Recent researches argues that social policy reforms are even more successful if the strategies adopted by the public authorities focus on the sensemaking behind these policies in accordance with the social values of a country. We use the experience of a project conducted in 2012 for the reform of care in oncology. The analysis highlights the influence of the international donor who was funding this project and was trying to impose some logics that did not correspond neither with the stakeholders’ expectations nor with the ground realities. This study, based on North American methodology of case studies, clearly shows the importance of the sensemaking that must be given in the development of social policies, along with the risk, when this rule is not followed, to see these policies negatively affect the economic performance of a country.