Ministry of Construction with IFC: Preparing Yangon's Elevated Expressway

Yangon's first elevated expressway was one of Myanmar's largest planned infrastructure projects, to be delivered through a public-private tender advised by IFC. Projects of this scale touch residents, businesses, commuters, civil society and the media, and criticism that goes unanswered can delay or derail them.

The Ministry of Construction needed to understand every stakeholder before the tender, prepare specialised reputation management plans for each, and hand the winning bidder a complete communications and branding strategy it could act on from day one.

Ruder Finn Era took a research-based approach, studying the concerns of affected groups and the issues that comparable infrastructure projects had faced elsewhere, so that likely criticisms could be anticipated rather than discovered.

From that evidence the team mapped all key stakeholders and the issues associated with each, and developed custom stakeholder maps with tailored engagement strategies that set out who needed to be informed, consulted or involved at each stage of the project.

The output was consolidated into a full communications plan that the ministry approved, and two handover trainings equipped Ministry of Construction staff to use and update the plan themselves, building capability that would outlast the engagement.