THE SOUTH WOLLO AND OROMIYA ZONES have a terrifying nickname: the “buckle of the Ethiopian famine belt.” Farmers there tell of massive losses of livestock and other assets as a result of the inevitable droughts that afflict the region. It has been estimated that two-thirds of people there are poor and that one out of seven live in extreme poverty. Evidence suggests that many households “churn” in and out of poverty, often as a result of severe shocks such as drought. Aggregate statistics and one-time studies miss this poverty dynamic and cannot measure which families recover from a temporary drop into poverty, nor why. BASIS-sponsored research attempted to discover the degree to which the drought of 1999-2000 affected poverty trends in rural Ethiopia.