This paper offers a detailed analysis of the social protection financing landscape, identifying challenges and proposing reforms. Suggested solutions include self-financed contributory schemes, fiscal and public finance reforms, debt relief and restructuring, climate finance instruments, and global funding mechanisms. The paper’s added value lies in politicizing a typically technical discussion and drawing comparative insights from five national contexts: Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Tunisia, and Morocco. The paper in particular emphasizes the importance of contributory schemes and redistributive tax systems as alternative mechanisms to finance universal social protection, focusing on the reforms needed to put these two tools into practice. Contributory schemes face challenges due to a lack of political will, public distrust, and a large informal labor sector. They should, nonetheless, be expanded to include informal labor, migrants, and refugees, with governments and employers significantly subsidizing contributions. In turn, tax systems are weakened by evasion, avoidance, and their regressive nature. Poor tax administration and corruption also deplete public resources, which are already strained by high military expenditures and other public spending priorities.