P-ISSN: 2808-0467 E-ISSN: 2808-5051 Homepage: https://iss.internationaljournallabs.com/index.php/iss 2387 ISSUES AFFECTING ALMAJIRI SCHOOLS IN NIGERIA: WATER, SANITATION, AND HYGIENE (WASH) PARAMETERS IN SOKOTO Yusuf Yahaya Miya 1* , Jamil Abdul-Kareem 2 , Abdullahi Sa’eed 3 , Yusuf Sarkingobir 4 , Aminu Musa Yabo 5 , Zayyanu Bello 6 1,2 Galaxy College of Health Technology Bauchi, Bauchi State, Nigeria 3 Dambam Almanzoor Hospital and Diagnostic Center Bauchi, Bauchi State, Nigeria 4 Department of Environmental Education, Faculty of Education, Shehu Shagari University of Education Sokoto, Nigeria 5 Dean Faculty of Education, Shehu Shagari University of Education Sokoto, Nigeria 6 Sultan Abdurrahman College of Health Technology Gwadabawa, Sokoto state, Nigeria * superoxidedismutase594@gmail.com PAPER INFO ABSTRACT Received: May 2023 Revised: June 2023 Approved: June 2023 Background: There are many dimensions to the consequences of lack of sanitation, that are threat to public health. Diarrhea and relations due to poor WASH kills and put on cost on family and economy at large. Poor WASH affects economy in the sense that, millions of persons are unable to yield maximum productivity due to sickness, millions of working hours lost, and millions of schooling hours lost. Aim: This study performed an assessment of water, sanitation, and hygiene among Almajiri schools in Sokoto state, Nigeria. Method: A survey using a sample size of 300 schools gotten via simple random sampling, analyzed with descriptive statistics and chi-square test. Findings: The Almajiri schools surveyed, 3.3% of them have basic sanitation; 6.7% had limited sanitation; and most of them (90.0%) have no service at all (unimproved sanitation facilities or no sanitation facilities at the school). No Almajiri school had basic hygiene services (that is handwashing water and soap at the latrine vicinity), 33.7% had limited hygiene services, that is, they recorded acquiring of handwashing facilities with water but no soap available at the school at the time of the inspection, 66.6% of the schools had no services, that is no handwashing facilities or no water available at the school during the survey. Chi-square test has shown that there is significant difference in levels of water, sanitation, and hygiene among Almajiri schools in Sokoto state, Nigeria at p<0.05. KEYWORDS Almajiri, disease, sanitation, handwashing, health, education © The author(s). This work is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0) INTRODUCTION A person that migrates for the sake of Almighty Allah or anything regarding Islamic religion is dubbed as Almuhajir as drawn from the famous Arabic language. However, that same word was corrupted by the Hausa people in their Hausa language as a result of the interaction of Islam and Hausa land from the time immemorial in history (Auta, 2021; Isiaka, 2015). That Arabic word Almuhajir was transmogrified by Hausa language to another new word dubbed as Almajiri, which then was put to use as a Hausa word. It typically refers to a person who has left his house or town and attend a boarding school in the sought of Islamic knowledge. The word Almajiri is refering to a single person, Almajirai is for many people, and Almajirici is the name of the practice, the schools were Almajirai are taught are dubbed as Almajiri school (Gomment & Esomchi, 2017).