H.B.S.1- (Hawker Back To School)

By-Okafor Chika U.




Inspired by the hawker and thoughtfully designed for the hawker, to assist , to aid, to simplify and to ameliorate the task of the hawker in their everyday quest to ply their informal sector trade, self taught designer, blogger and maker Okafor Chika U. has come to the rescue with a simple elegant solution. The World's first Multi-Purpose, Multi-Function Bag called the H.B.S.1 which means "Hawker Back To School" a bag geared towards solving the ever increasing worldwide informal trading sector termed "Hawking".



Debuting the H.B.S.1 a.k.a "Hawker Back To School" @ the MakerFaireAfrica Nairobi 2010 for the first time and taking top honors prize in the art category for best design.The deep thought design process behind the award winning bag begins to emerge with features incorporated into the bag that transforms this ordinary looking ,knapsack, rucksack bag, packsack or backpack bag into a hawker bag assisting the hawker to not only engage in the informal sector street hawking trade but also to further acquire skills,semi-skills, formal and informal education as well as tertiary education through training classes either before or after hawking activities and reverting back to it's previous form.Thus the derived name H.B.S.1  "Hawker Back To School" and One(1) being Prototype One.


By not only engaging in the hawking trade, but availed also of the opportunity to acquire professional skills the H.B.S.1 ensures that hawking is not only temporal and transient but the hawker also gains the necessary education enabling a climb up the income bracket thereby closing and narrowing income disparities in society which leads to social stratification.


Upon field testing the H.B.S.1 a.k.a Hawker Back To School to tweak the design features and work out the kinks in functionality, further insight was gained into the potential multiple uses and possible applications of the H.B.S.1 across a wide range of industry sectors for example ranging from professional to amateur scientific research studies sample collection(e.g biological samples and specimen, delicate archaeological specimen), to the transportation of vaccines to remote areas maintaining the cold chain, to the distribution and delivery of aid to victims of natural and man-made disasters, in the construction and building engineering sectors; as a first aid kit in civilian and military application etc. 


Inadvertently making the H.B.S.1 a unique multi-functional and multi-purpose one-stop solution bag across a wide-range of industry sectors.....a kinda swiss army knife of bags....The marketplace awaits this seemlingly innocuous bag's debut,which is poised to taking on a myriad of world's challenges proffering solutions.