Umair
Prince Harry has resigned as the patron of a charity he founded in southern Africa, his office said in a statement on Wednesday. The move followed a clash between the charity’s board of trustees and its board chair.
Harry and his fellow patron, Prince Seeiso of Lesotho, said they were quitting as faces of the charity, Sentebale, which is registered in Britain but operates in southern Africa, in solidarity with its board of trustees. Five of the board’s nine members resigned this week.
“It is devastating that the relationship between the charity’s trustees and the chair of the board broke down beyond repair, creating an untenable situation,” the two princes said in a joint statement. They added: “We are in shock that we have to do this, but we have a continued responsibility to Sentebale’s beneficiaries, so we will be sharing all of our concerns with the Charity Commission as to how this came about.”
Harry established Sentebale with Seeiso, the younger brother of King Letsie III of Lesotho, in 2006. Founded in honor of Harry’s mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, the charity raised funds for communities affected by the H.I.V. pandemic in Lesotho, a small landlocked kingdom that is one of the world’s poorest countries. In 2019, it expanded its work into nearby Botswana, and to addressing substance abuse, gender-based violence and other social ills among young people.
In recent months, the organization’s leadership has been at loggerheads. The five trustees who resigned said in a joint statement that they had called on the board’s chair, Sophie Chandauka, to resign from her position, after losing “trust and confidence” in her. They said that Ms. Chandauka had responded by filing a lawsuit in Britain “to block us from voting her out,” and that they were resigning to avoid burdening the charity with the cost of the suit.
“We could not in good conscience allow Sentebale to undertake that legal and financial burden and have been left with no other option but to vacate our positions,” they said. “This was not a choice willingly made, but rather something we felt forced into in order to look after the charity.”
Ms. Chandauka said in a statement that she had acted to expose what she described as “issues of poor governance, weak executive management, abuse of power, bullying, harassment, misogyny, misogynoir,” a term referring to pointed sexism toward Black women, “and the coverup that ensued.” In addition to filing a case in an English court, she said, she had reported the trustees to Britain’s Charity Commission.
“There are people in this world who behave as though they are above the law and mistreat people, and then play the victim card and use the very press they disdain to harm people who have the courage to challenge their conduct,” she said in her statement. Harry has previously brought high-profile legal cases against British newspapers.
Ms. Chandauka, a lawyer based in New York City, served on the Sentebale board from 2009 to 2015, and was appointed as its chair in July 2023. Her role now, she said, would focus on securing wider streams of funding for the organization.
The charity said in a statement on Wednesday that it had restructured its board under the leadership of Ms. Chandauka as part of a “transformation agenda” that would broaden the scope of its work to include business development and climate resilience in southern Africa.
The princes’ statement did not specifically address the allegations leveled by Ms. Chandauka.
“Although we may no longer be patrons, we will always be its founders, and we will never forget what this charity is capable of achieving when it is in the right care,” the princes said.
A spokeswoman for the Charity Commission said that the regulator was “assessing the issues to determine the appropriate regulatory steps.”
