Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries present abundant solar potential, which to some extent has been exploited for electricity production. However, the largest part of this potential remains still unexploited. The scope of this paper is to present the best practices in exploiting solar energy in selected MENA countries. First the general structure of energy market related to Renewable Energy Sources (RES) for each analyzed country is presented. Then the exploitation of solar energy via PVs with special focus to the achievements in rural electrification, which could be used as a paradigm for other countries with similar problems, is displayed. MENA countries are promising for the wide application of concentrating solar plants (CSP), as recent research has shown, and some interesting applications in this area, also presented in this paper, have started being implemented.