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.
The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) is an international organization focused on non-profit agricultural research and training that empowers farmers through science and innovation to nourish the world amid a climate crisis.
Sanjay was approached to turn the Best Management Practices into effective and impactful training sessions. Drawing from his now long experience working with farmers, Sanjay went on to research not only the culture, literacy level, common language, nomenclature, tools used, participation level of gender and age groups in agricultural practices, the distribution of agricultural activities over the year, local material available for training, but also the usual characteristics of a trainers and the shortsightedness of farmers.
The ‘push–pull’ technology is a novel pest management strategy developed for control of stemborers and striga weed, Striga hermonthica, in maize-based farming systems, where maize is intercropped with desmodium, a forage legume, and Napier grass is planted as a border crop. Desmodium repels stemborer moths while Napier grass attracts them.
When the pest and the weed slipped into the Nepalese agriculture system, Sanjay was asked to urgently create a training module to train farmers into fighting the possible catastrophe effectively.
CIMMYT- International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center