The Afghan Ministry of Information and Culture (MoIC) on Thursday said that it has ordered the Institute of Tourism and Hotel Management to help boost the tourism sector in Afghanistan.

The institute was established two years ago with the aim of recruiting students to receive training in the area of hotel management and tourism.

Currently, the institute is providing classes to three categories of students in Kabul.

“I got the inspiration from television about the people making trips, so I decided to take an exam and I passed it,” said Fatima, a student of Tourism and Hotel Management.

“If work had been done in the tourism sector in Afghanistan in the past 20 years, there would be a good income source for Afghanistan,” said another student, Mohammad Nabi.

27 people are working in the structure of the institute and it is planning to expand its training programs to Badakhshan, Bamiyan and some other historically important sites in the provinces.

“When a tourist travels to an area, alongside other facilities, we also need to have hotel management services,” said Ramin Atiqzada, the head of the Tourism Institute.

During the 1970s, over 120,000 tourists were visiting only Bamiyan province in central Afghanistan.

After agriculture, tourism was the second largest income source for Afghanistan.