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espite being a traditional yet popular place for religious education, pesantren (Islamic boarding schools) are notorious for their poor sanitation. This trend, experts say, threatens the country’s ambitions of achieving its sustainable development goals (SDGs).

“There is a saying that a student officially becomes a santri [pesantren student] when he or she has been infected with scabies,” said Khoirun Huda, the secretary of the Banten Ansor Youth Movement (Ansor), part of the youth wing of the country’s largest Islamic organization Nahdlatul Ulama, at a press conference in Cikini, Central Jakarta, on Monday.

Ansor, the Tangerang administration and the International NGO Forum on Indonesian Development (INFID) conducted a survey examining the sanitation system and hygiene habits of 829 pesantren in Tangerang, Banten, in November and December last year.

“Most of the pesantren did not have a proper sanitation system. Many santri still use river water for bathing and laundry,” he said, adding that many pesantren only had small roofless stilt toilets with bamboo partitions above rivers or ponds.

Khoirun added that communal living conditions in the dorms meant that contagious diseases spread rapidly in the pesantren.

Financial issues are the main reason why the pesantren fail to provide proper sanitation facilities.

A 2017 study by Agus Aan Adriansyah, an undergraduate student of the School of Health at Nahdlatul Ulama University, Surabaya, East Java, found that there are at least 14 illnesses frequently suffered by santri, such as scabies, respiratory diseases and gastritis, which spread rapidly because of poor sanitation as well as the poor personal hygiene of the santri.

Hanifah Haris, a program manager at Amani Indonesia, an NGO focusing on female Muslim empowerment, recalled her experiences of communal bathing during her 12 years in a pesantren.

“I enrolled in a pesantren in East Java in 1989. At that time, there were thousands of girls who lived together. We had to bathe together around a giant tub of water every day,” she said.

Bathrooms using shared water tubs meant diseases spread easily in the pesantren.

Sugeng Bahagijo, the director of INFID, said good sanitation was a crucial element of the SDGs.

“President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo has targeted 100 percent coverage for sanitation and clean water. In this sense, the pesantren should be involved,” he said.

Erwin Mawardy, the Tangerang administration’s head of infrastructure planning, said the regional government was planning to build standardized toilets, bathrooms and laundry facilities in the pesantren.

“We began building sanitation facilities in schools in 2012. We will now broaden the program to religious dorms, which house thousands of our young people,” he said.

Erwin proposed a model of integrated individual bathrooms with a laundry facility on the rooftop of the building.

“Besides building the facilities, it is also important to make this program sustainable through continuous education on cleanliness.”

M. Imdadun Rahmat, the executive director of the Said Aqil Siradj Institute, said many Muslims forgot that the Prophet Muhammad took hygiene seriously.

“Cleanliness is a part of our faith [...] the Prophet has taught us everything about keeping ourselves and our environment clean,” he said.“Improving sanitation in the pesantren is not only a matter of religion. It is also about improving the living conditions of the poor members of our society,” he said. “This initiative allows them to fulfill their basic needs.”