A kindhearted guy bought 10,000 abandoned bikes so poor students in his country don’t have to walk to school! His kind deed has gone viral, with many people commending him for the generosity.
Some years ago, the bike sharing concept led many companies to buy thousands of bikes. But though they were able to profit for some time, people eventually ditched the concept in favor of other forms of transportation, leading many bikes to be abandoned in empty yards.
Because the abandoned bikes were just rotting in the yards, many of the companies simply send them to the recycling plants because no one is interested in renting them anymore.
Enter Mike Than Tun Win, a business school graduate from Myanmar who went to study in Singapore for 18 years. He knew about the problem of abandoned bikes in Singapore and other Asian countries. But when he went back to his home country, he saw that many poor students had to walk for hours to reach their schools.
He realized that he could help unburden richer countries like Singapore of their problems with abandoned bikes while also helping solve the problem of these poor kids.
With his earnings from the tech company he built in Myanmar, Mike began to import the abandoned bikes from Singapore and other countries. He reached out to bike sharing companies like oBike, ofo, and Mobike to obtain the bikes for the kids.
While brand new bikes are sold at around US$150 to US$200, Mike only gets to spend US$35 to US$40 to ship these bikes from their countries of origin to the poor villages, with 50% of the project cost covered by donors who believe in his cause.
Mike and his team have since obtained over 10,000 abandoned bikes from Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, and even as far as the Netherlands. They fix the bikes, replace the digital locks with regular ones, and even add additional seats at the back so that the kids can let a sibling or friend ride to school.
