Mohalenyane Phakela

MUSIC producer and budding entrepreneur, Sechaba “Sir Schaba” Moqoko, will participate in the Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES) that will be held at Stanford University in the United States.

Running from 22-24 June 2016, GES will be hosted by President Barack Obama. Sir Schaba will join more than 700 entrepreneurs from 170 countries around the world, including a large number of social entrepreneurs, in interactive discussions and workshops with top Silicon Valley executives and investors from around the world. Among the goals of the summit is to help delegates transform their ideas into reality.

According to the Ultimate Music Award winner, he applied to participate in the international business forum by pitching a business idea for an online music store to officials at the US Embassy in Maseru in February.

“I pitched the idea of Lesotho’s first ever online music store called YME Tunes at the American embassy after hearing about the opportunity,” he told XpressPeople this past week.

“Much like iTunes and Tracksource, the application will allow people to buy local songs online and pay through mobile phone-based money transfer services such as M-Pesa and Ecocash.”

Sir Schaba said he intended to glean as much information as he could at GES so he can implement it on the YME Tunes project.

“The skills which I will learn at the summit will help accelerate the YME Tunes idea which is already in motion and almost complete. I am hoping that YME Tunes will be operational sometime next month.”

He said the idea for YME Tunes was borne out of a desire to see local artists financially benefiting from their craft.

“I become very emotional when talking about local artists having seen how they are abused, undermined and oppressed,” said Sir Schaba.

“We all know that they are struggling to make a living from their talents and hardly get any royalties for their hard work. So through the online store, that dream of earning a living from their music will be realised.”

He said the artists would only need to register on YME Tunes so their music is available on the application for sale.