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.

The best quality bikes available in Cambodia are gently used bikes from Japan.  They arrive in containers to a local bike shop where they are refurbished with new baskets, racks, brakes, bells, locks and tires. The bikes are loaded into trucks and transported to our remote primary schools and the bikes are awarded on Opening Day before the whole school.

Enrollment in secondary school rose 35% the first year we initiated our bicycle program and has improved every year since.
Since 2010 to 2024, we have awarded 4,818 bicycles. 

In Preah Vihear, we work at the very remote primary schools of Koh Ker and Romchek villages. Once students graduate Grade 6, their only option for middle school is in Srayang, some 15 kilometres away. For their families, this distance is too far for a daily commute. Our trucks pick students up every morning at dawn to enable them to come into town to continue their eduacation. They attend school in the morning, then head to our Srayang Learning Center for lunch and afternoon classes, before being dropped back off in the villages at the end of the day.