Mr Shigeru Aoyagi is the Director and UNESCO Representative to Bhutan, India, Maldives and Sri Lanka. Prior to that, he served as Director of the UNESCO Office in Kabul and as UNESCO Representative to Afghanistan. Shigeru joined UNESCO in July 2002, as Chief of the Literacy and Non-Formal Education (NFE) section within the Education Sector at Headquarters in Paris, where he supervised, managed and coordinated the section’s work within the framework of Education For All (EFA), as well as its work on literacy and NFE for the four regional programmes for universalization of primary education and the eradication of illiteracy. He also contributed to the adoption of the UN resolutions on the United Nations Literacy Decade (UNLD) International Plan of Action, coordinated the EFA Flagship programmes on UNLD and the UNESCO-FAO joint programme on Rural People, and worked on the launch of the Literacy Initiative for Empowerment at the international level and in the 11 first-round implementation countries.