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.”
