Unilever has announced the global roll-out of Domestos Toilet Academies project. It will be launched next year starting with a pilot Academy in Vietnam opening, that will help provide sustainable and long-term solutions to sanitation that benefit local societies and help stimulate the local economies.

Photo: World Toilet Day, a snapshot from www.worldtoilet.org

Statistics says there are 2.6 billion people across the globe without access to clean toilets, so The Domestos Toilet Academy, developed in conjunction with the World Toilet Organization, will make a good service for people in countries facing the problem. It will run month-long training courses for local people interested in setting up their own businesses to source, sell and maintain toilets, and educate local communities on the importance of sanitation. In Vietnam, only half the population has ‘a kind of’ sanitation facility, and 82% do not have access to facilities that meet the hygiene standards of the country’s Ministry of Health.

The Domestos Toilet Academy will work on solving the program towards the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) for sanitation; to halve the proportion of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015, and therefore contribute to Millennium Development Goal 4, to reduce child mortality.

To celebrate World Toilet Day on November 19 and raise awareness of the problem, ToiletDay.org and Matt Damon invite people to donate a voice on Twitter or Facebook to talk shi*t about the global toilet crisis.

Users can authorize ToiletDay.org to post once daily status updates from either their Facebook or Twitter account until World Toilet Day this Saturday. The first tweet that appeared yesterday said: “More people have a mobile phone than a toilet” and uses the Twitter hashtag #TalkShit.

The initiative reminds of the project by MTV using the same word and titled ‘Give a Shit.’ The ‘Talk sh*t all week’ campaign launched by Water.org (co-founded by Matt Damon), the GatesFoundation, Acumen,  ONE, Worldtoilet.org, Change.org and Water for People draws attention with using is expletives such as ‘shit’ and ‘crap’ and thus to add a bit of humor to the delicate topic.