The Stages-of-Progress methodology helps identify context-specific reasons associated with households' movements into or out of poverty. Developed in 2002, it was used over the next seven years for examining the experiences of 35,567 households in 398 diverse communities of India, Kenya, Uganda, Peru, and North Carolina. This essay looks at the reasons that motivated the development of a different methodology for exploring poverty flows, explores the steps involved, and briefly presents key results. Large numbers of households have fallen into poverty in every context examined, but large numbers have also become persistently poor. Different reasons are associated, respectively, with escaping poverty and falling into poverty. Different policies are, therefore, required to deal with each of the two poverty flows. (Contains 8 tables and 28 footnotes.)