Lixil Group Corp., a major Japanese toilet and other housing equipment manufacturer, has been offering affordable and clean toilets to help enhance sanitation in developing nations.

Lixil has put in place 1.2 million units of the "safe toilet," or SATO, in developing countries through donations by civic groups and foundations as well as Lixil's direct sales, helping improve the sanitation situation of around 6 million people, according to the company.

The toilet, developed in 2012 by Lixil's American Standard brand, was launched in Bangladesh in 2013, and it has also been commercially available in Uganda, Kenya and India.

SATO is designed to flush waste with only 200 milliliters of water and has a counterweighted trap door to minimizes odors as well as the passage of flies and other disease-carrying insects, said Tadashi Matsuoka of the Tokyo-based company.

The toilet is structured so simply that it can be produced, distributed and installed all in the targeted developing countries, the company said.

Lixil seeks to reach an additional 15 million people, with a plan to manufacture and distribute toilets in Nigeria, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Rwanda, South Africa, Vietnam, Indonesia, Haiti, Ghana, Malawi, and the Philippines with a $1 million funding under a new program launched in September at the U.N. General Assembly meetings in New York.

The Water Innovation Engine, established by the U.N. High Level Panel on Water, launched the Urban Sanitation Challenge program, which funds projects tackling poor sanitation in developing countries.

"Priced from $2 to $10, depending on model and country, they (Lixil toilets) offer an effective, affordable way to mitigate the dangers and unpleasantness of typical pit latrines," according to Grand Challenges Canada, which leads the program.

Grand Challenges Canada is funded by the Canadian government and other partners and provides funds to innovators to help improve lives in low- and middle-income countries.

The blue plastic toilet "looks simple but is designed by utilizing knowledge of hydrodynamics," Akane Odake, a senior manager of Lixil, said.

According to Lixil, approximately 2.3 billion people in the world lack access to safe and sanitary toilets, of whom 892 million are forced to practice open defecation.

What's more, every day 800 children under the age of five die from diarrheal diseases due to unclean water or poor sanitary conditions, it said.

Lixil hopes to make the venture a stand-alone business by 2020 and improve hygienic environments for 100 million people.

"We set up the social toilet department in 2016 to help resolve the grave problem of sanitation in developing countries," Matsuoka said.

Lixil carried out a campaign from April to September to donate a SATO unit to developing countries every time it sold one of its integrated shower toilets.

The response to the program has been better than imagined, Yuka Okamoto, a spokeswoman for Lixil, said. "As more than 200,000 units have been donated, we believe (the program) has also raised the public awareness about sanitary problems in developing countries," she added.