In this paper, I wish to focus on three social spheres in the MENA region where private charities and NGOs are playing an increasingly prominent role and public policy is lagging. The first is poverty and exclusion, the second, youth integration and the last concerns aging societies and their corresponding need for care. These issues represent significant challenges to social protection policy in the MENA region and concur to the multidimensional crisis many Arab countries are presently undergoing. In the three cases, the more conspicuous practices of "doing good" and signs of "taking care" emerging from public and private benevolent actors seem to outweigh public policies that propose welfare mixes in response to acute social challenges and expressions of conflict. I argue that the proliferation of benevolent and voluntary schemes is not liable to satisfy the needs expressed in these three spheres, but merely provides frameworks for humanitarian government and containment.