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Satellite-based rainfall products are essential for retrieving rainfall, particularly in data-scarce and drought-prone countries like Ethiopia. However, their quality needs to be validated prior to their use. Therefore, we evaluated the performance of the Climate Hazards group Infrared Precipitation with Stations version 2.0 (CHIRPS), the Tropical Applications of Meteorology using Satellite data version 3.0 (TAMSAT3), and the African Rainfall Climatology version 2 (ARC2) satellite rainfall estimates in the Ethiopian Rift Valley Lakes Basin. Their skill of retrieval was evaluated against ground-measured rainfall at dekadal, monthly, and seasonal scales across agroclimatic zones over 2001 to 2017. Finally, these satellite products have demonstrated different levels of agreement with the reference data, being the highest for CHIRPS and the lowest for ARC2. At all timescales and agroclimatic zones, ARC2 has severely …