Sanjay Madnani is a Communication Strategist and Designer by profession, an Animation Film Designer, an illustrator, a cartoonist, a satirist, and a storyteller by passion.
From a cartoonist in Hindi newspapers, to a design student, to a commercial sector professional, to an educator, to a Development Communication professional, his journey has had dramatic turns. None, however, felt alien to him.
Being a development sector insider for twenty odd years, Sanjay weighs heavily on the fact that development and governance still has a enormous void to be filled by design, design thinking and design process. Focused on Communication for Development (C4D), Social and Behavioral Change Communication (SBCC), Indigenous media and new media, he has multiple crosscutting projects across the globe to his credit.
Sanjay resides in Nepal, calls India his home, then again, he travels around a lot for work.
In Indonesia cooperatives are legal enterprises that are jointly owned and democratically operated by its members. They are an important platform to improve farmers’ access to financing, inputs, and markets. The journey to create a cooperative, however, is a long and winding one. Very few people have that kind of knowledge, but SNV has expertise that helps them to accelerate the bureaucratic process.
Sanjay was commissioned to help structure the curriculum, input the content, and then create comprehensive training sessions and tools to enable farmers to group themselves and make cooperatives and reap the benefits of working in tandem. The purpose of this training was to provide training or facilitation guidelines for individuals, and informal groups that have an interest in building knowledge, skills, and experiences on livelihood. The training activities contained in the manual were designed to help participants develop the understanding and basic skills necessary to apply the concepts of cooperating effectively and efficiently.
It was equally important for Sanjay to first understand the concepts and practices involving building a cooperative. His previous knowledge of bookkeeping and accounting came in handy. He weaved the content in such a form that the training sessions felt like a storytelling session which every trainee could identify with. Following the on-the-field research and several workshops with SNV’s local staff, Sanjay took on the task to find ways for the practical sessions and information to be delivered effectively, to illustrate the techniques, create Flip-Files, flashcards, handouts, and other training tools.
Upon testing of these tools, first in small and then larger groups, several sessions of altering the training mechanisms and tools were conducted.
SNV- Netherlands Development Organization