The Phoenix Metric G-SROI: A Feminist Bricolage Approach to MEL

This poster was presented by Taieba Hosne Ishrat at the OMLC Learning Lab 2025.

Conventional monitoring and evaluation systems often celebrate success through indicators such as income growth, repayment rates, or participation. Yet across South and Southeast Asia, women’s lived realities have repeatedly told a different story: rising unpaid care burdens, quiet fear, constrained mobility, and sacrifices made invisible by standard metrics. This disjuncture between numbers and lived experience became the starting point for The Phoenix Metric: Gender–Social Return on Investment (G-SROI).

Developed through feminist evaluative practice and grounded in feminist economics, intersectionality, and participatory research, G-SROI redefines “return” beyond financial performance. It recognises that empowerment is not only about income, but about the redistribution of power, time, care, safety, and voice. The framework integrates quantitative indicators with narrative valuation to capture domains that are routinely left behind, agency, care redistribution, relational wellbeing, safety, and intergenerational change, while also accounting for unintended harm or “dark logic.” Rather than a fixed tool, G-SROI is intentionally designed as a bricolage: an evolving, adaptable approach that balances analytical rigour with ethical responsibility.

This poster introduces G-SROI as an invitation to practitioners, researchers, and organisations to measure impact more honestly, and to value what has too often been rendered invisible.