Bicycles & Transport

At the beginning of each school year, we award bicycles to all students who graduated from Grade 6 at the primary schools supported by PLF. These bikes enable students to get to secondary school, which are often many kilometers from their villages. They also serve as an enormous incentive to finish Grade 6 whether they continue to secondary school or not, and we have built a secondary incentive by awarding bicycles to the first and second ranked students in class for Grades 4 and 5.

Enrollment in secondary school rose 35% the first year we initiated our bicycle program and has improved every year since.
Since 2010 to 2026, we have awarded 5,884 bicycles. 

In the rural villages of Koh Ker and Romchek in northern Cambodia, finishing Grade 6 is a major milestone. But for many, it’s also where the road ends, literally. The nearest middle school is 15 kilometers away in Srayang, an impossible daily journey for most families.

This isn’t a new challenge for PLF. We’ve been solving it, mile by mile, for over a decade.

Back in 2010, when the first village students completed Grade 6, there were no nearby middle schools, no transport, no options. So we built a dormitory in Srayang, a safe haven beside the school where a handful of students could live in order to continue learning.

In 2020, we transformed the dorm into Srayang Learning Center and put trucks on the road – giving a much greater number of village students the opportunity of accessing high school.

Now, instead of having to leave home so young, students can access school while remaining living with their families where they belong. Every morning at dawn, our trucks set out to collect students and bring them to Srayang, where they attend government class in the mornings, before heading to our Learning Center for a nutritious lunch and extra classes that round out the gaps in the public school education.