We present a bijection for toroidal maps that are essentially $3$-connected ($3$-connected in the periodic planar representation). Our construction actually proceeds on certain closely related bipartite toroidal maps with all faces of degree $4$ except for a hexagonal root-face. We show that these maps are in bijection with certain well-characterized bipartite unicellular maps. Our bijection, closely related to the recent one by Bonichon and Lévêque for essentially 4-connected toroidal triangulations, can be seen as the toroidal counterpart of the one developed in the planar case by Fusy, Poulalhon and Schaeffer, and it extends the one recently proposed by Fusy and Lévêque for essentially simple toroidal triangulations. Moreover, we show that rooted essentially $3$-connected toroidal maps can be decomposed into two pieces, a toroidal part that is treated by our bijection, and a planar part that is treated by the above-mentioned planar case bijection. This yields a combinatorial derivation for the bivariate generating function of rooted essentially $3$-connected toroidal maps, counted by vertices and faces.