How Harry’s HIV charity that promises ‘never to forget’ has left behind the very Lesotho orphans it was set up to save: SUE REID meets the locals who say their pleas for help have been ignored

A few yards from the tall security gates at the entrance of Prince Harry’s Sentebale headquarters in Lesotho is the tiny brick house where five young orphans live with their granny, Liketso Matela.

The children’s mother is dead. They are cared for by Liketso, an impoverished hair-braider in Lihaseng village, where the prince set up his charity to help families suffering from the HIV infection which ravages this landlocked mountainous country.

Last October, the Matela clan, some with no shoes, watched in awe as smart cars swept past their shack taking Harry to the HQ to celebrate nearly two decades of Sentebale’s work in Africa.

‘Prince Harry didn’t wave or stop to say hello to us when he drove by to the ceremony’, Liketso, 58, told me last week as she stood on the dirt road outside her home, half a minute’s walk from the charity headquarters.

‘I have asked his Sentebale to give my grandchildren a few meals, even some clothing. The staff at the door have always said no. We have got nothing from them.’

Yet the orphan boys and girls (Emanuelo, Tsepang, Lethabo, Naleli and Katleho) – whose single mother was an HIV sufferer – are surely exactly the kind of youngsters who Harry’s charity was designed to help.

In Lesotho nearly one in four adults are HIV positive and it has the world’s second highest rate of the infection.

Thanks to the prince’s enormous efforts as patron, Sentebale has reaped millions of pounds over the years from his crowd- drawing celebrity polo matches, a successful TV documentary, from fund-raising dinners, sales of his best-selling autobiographical book Spare and donations from international benefactors.

Liketso Matela, 58, centre back, with her grandchildren, from left, Emanuelo, 15, Katleho, 3, Lethabo, 7, Naleli, 5, and Tsepang, 13, live in their small two-roomed house. Liketso has appealed to Sentebale for help many times only to be turned away

But now the charity is in chaos. Harry quit last month as patron following the abrupt resignation of some trustees amid a tussle about Sentebale’s future.

In London the charity’s office is ‘temporarily closed’, the website said this week, adding on its donation page an enigmatic message: ‘Talked about? Yes. Distracted? Never. The work continues.’

Meanwhile in Lesotho, we found the grand HQ, opened by Prince Harry amid a fanfare of publicity in 2015, being run by a handful of staff last week.

Sentebale’s website says that rooms in the chalet bungalows and conference areas on site can be hired by visitors for holidays, retreats and other events when children’s residential camps are not in operation.

In the large car park enclosed by wire fencing were smart 4×4 vehicles and limousines. Some had logos on the side saying they were the property of Sentebale or bought by ‘donations’.

Volunteer Maneo Mahao teaches orphans at the Little Angels school, which is in a crumbling brick shack with no running water or heating and concrete floors

Prince Harry set up Sentebale in Princess Diana’s memory nearly two decades ago with his friend, Lesotho’s Crown Prince Seeiso (right), after he spent his gap year in the country. The Mamohato Children’s Centre offers vital support to children affected by HIV

Harry has expressed ‘shock’ at parting from the organisation he set up in Princess Diana’s memory in 2006 with his friend, Lesotho’s Crown Prince Seeiso, after he spent his gap year in the country.

The trustees stepped down as a ‘result of a loss in trust and confidence’ in the chairwoman of Sentebale’s board, Zimbabwe-born, London-trained finance lawyer Dr Sophie Chandauka who has an MBE for promoting diversity in British business.

Without naming names, she has since alleged a cover-up at Sentebale over ‘issues of poor governance, weak executive management, abuse of power, bullying, harassment, misogyny and misogynoir’ – a term for the inbuilt hatred of black women.

At the heart of the fallout is thought to be Dr Chandauka’s decision to centre the charity’s leadership in Africa rather than London, which has always been Sentebale’s influential powerhouse.

She has also questioned whether the charity should focus solely on HIV/Aids victims or tackle other issues such as climate change.

Dr Chandauka, who has an honorary doctorate from Coventry University, has told The Financial Times that Sentebale must move with the times in a ‘post-Black Lives Matter world’.

According to the BBC, the hiring of expensive consultants to advise Sentebale on how to hike donations – in what is a difficult time for the charity sector – has also split its leadership.

In March, President Trump called Lesotho ‘a country nobody has ever heard of’ as he defended in the US Congress sweeping cuts in aid handouts from America to numerous foreign nations.

He singled out a past US aid project of ‘eight million dollars’ to promote LGBTQI+ in Lesotho where rampant HIV/AIDS wiped out a generation of parents, leaving thousands of orphans. It is not known whether Sentebale received any of the funds criticised by the President.

As the charity row grew, Dr Chandauka reported the trustees to the UK’s Charity Commission, which has launched a ‘regulatory compliance’ inquiry welcomed by Harry. The watchdog is now in ‘direct contact with parties who have raised concerns’ as it examines the work of Sentebale and its trustees past and present.

In truth, the charity has had a bumpy path. In 2008, local childcare workers near Maseru, Lesotho’s capital, sounded the alarm to the Mail over how it was run.

Twenty-two-year-old Prince Harry wearing a shirt with the Sentebale logo with children from the Good Shepherd Centre, which helps mothers living in poverty or with illness, on a visit to Lesotho in 2006

Mpikete Kennedy Matsepe runs a little charity school for local HIV orphans within spitting distance of Sentebale’s fine headquarters. It has no funds and struggles to feed the children, aged three to six, who attend lessons each day

The workers contacted us with complaints that ‘westerners’ controlling Sentebale enjoyed generous salaries, new cars and had private school fees paid for their children.

This, they said, was unjust when an orphanage for local HIV victims, which I visited at the time and to whom Harry’s charity had pledged help, were going hungry. I found the youngsters in a building with a rotting roof and broken water pipes.

The charity explained back then, as more stories of the same nature emerged, that it could commit money only to Lesotho orphanages or other childcare facilities when full assurances were received about accountability.

It insisted there had to be financial transparency in line with the UK’s non-governmental organisation policy. Local jealousies about the ‘upstart’ charity with its prestigious royal links and heaps of money may have fuelled the criticisms.

Whatever the case, Sentebale, which in Lethoso’s Sesotho language means Forget-Me-Not, tightened its operation after my Mail exposé. One of the top staff members returned to England and the charity announced the African leadership was changing.

Yet despite the charity’s undoubted good work – it has operated hundreds of teenager training workshops, orphan respite camps, mothers help groups and health advice clinics for HIV victims throughout Lesotho – there were still concerns voiced by local people.

One of these centred on a little girl called Liketso who Harry was pictured cuddling as a ten-month-old baby at a Lesotho childcare centre when he began to set up his charity. Nicknamed Keke, little Liketso had been raped and tortured by her mother’s boyfriend who believed an evil witch doctor myth that sex with an infant would cure him of HIV.

Harry promised Keke help ‘through her education and life’ when he first met her. But as newspapers in Lesotho and the UK reported in 2015, she was rediscovered as a 12-year-old ‘all but abandoned by the same charity who had happily paraded her as a poster girl’.

Keke claimed to have received no care, counselling or medical help from Sentebale. Instead, she was living in poverty on 82p a day at her grandmother’s one-bedroom home in the mountains.

Over the nine years since Harry cuddled her, her family alleged Sentebale staff had visited her twice, in 2009 and 2013, giving her milk, clothes and £22 and promising to fund her high school fees – which never happened.

A Sentebale spokesman hit back at the claims, saying its staff had continued to take an interest in Keke’s welfare. It did not work with individual children or families but grassroots organisations and had given support to Keke’s school.

However, this child’s sorry tale did not surprise locals we met in Lesotho. They are fed up with Sentebale and accuse its staff of elbowing them aside as local orphans living with the terrible consequences of HIV are forgotten.

The local area’s chief is Khoabane Theko, 66, an imposing figure whose father gave the huge plot of land where the charity’s offices stand to the Lesotho royal family in the 1980s.

Maneo Mahao, 30, helps orphan Katleho with his shapes during a lesson at Little Angels. The school is a stone’s throw away from the gates of Sentebale-Mamohato Children’s Centre but has never received help from the charity

‘The two princes, Harry and Seeiso, used the land, where Lihaseng village once had a grocery shop, to put up the charity building in 2015,’ Chief Theko told me as we sat in his garden.

‘But despite my father’s gift, I have never been asked to have anything to do with Sentebale.

‘I cannot remember the name of one person from my area who has had an administration post at the headquarters. Locals are employed, but they are only given low-level jobs such as cleaning.

‘There is a certain arrogance about the people who run Sentebale, in my opinion. Now it seems to have collapsed.’

In a reference to the charity’s new apparent priorities under Dr Chandauka, he added: ‘Is it really right that climate change problems should be put before African orphan children’s problems?

‘The British Royal Family is respected here and Prince Harry must not get his hands dirtied by what is going on.’

As we left the chief’s house last weekend, we found 54-year-old local Mpikete Kennedy Matsepe, at the front door asking for help. He runs a little charity school for local HIV orphans within spitting distance of Sentebale’s fine headquarters. It has no funds and struggles to feed the children between three and six years old who attend lessons each day.

A young Prince Harry on a visit to Thuso Centre for children with multiple disabilities in 2014 in Bute-Bute, Lesotho

I visited Little Angels school where the orphans are taught by a 30-year-old volunteer teacher, a local woman called Maneo Mahao. It is in a crumbling brick shack with no running water or heating and concrete floors.

Eleven children arrived on time despite the pouring rain. Some were carried there tied in blankets on their granny’s back. Others had walked miles on potholed roads. Three wore Wellington boots in the morning class. And all kept their coats and hats on because of the autumn chill.

What I witnessed was one of the most enchanting but heartbreaking scenes of my life. The children said Christian prayers before they began lessons in English. They sang the Lesotho national anthem and learned – in old-fashioned, rote-style chanting – the seasons, the days of the week, as well as numbers up to ten.

Individually, they were called up to name the shapes – triangle, star, etc. – painted on the crumbling wall beside an old-fashioned blackboard. Their lunch was cooked by two volunteer ladies on a gas cylinder stove. It was a few handfuls for each of a cheap and hardly nutritious maize meal.

‘These children do not know they are HIV positive but all have lost their parents to the infection,’ Mr Matsepe explained: ‘We struggle to keep the school open and give them a meal each day.

‘I went to the chief for help because I have begged Sentebale and they refused us.’

He even went a few days ago to the Sentebale HQ, which until the recent brouhaha ran occasional HIV child victim camps there. He asked whether his school’s orphans could use any spare space. ‘They had no orphans when I visited, but I have some who need warmth and a proper classroom to do their lessons. They still said no to me.’

Mr Matsepe is living with HIV himself. He could be angry with Prince Harry but doesn’t blame him for Sentebale’s attitude.

‘He probably doesn’t even know we exist because the staff here running his charity won’t have told him. He flies in and they produce children from all over the country for him to be pictured with.’

We heard other stories. A farmer and community leader in Lihaseng told us he was asked to take eight teenage herd boys – another group Harry’s charity pledges to help – to perform a traditional dance at the 2015 opening.

Sentebale staff said they would give him a job and the boys an education if they attended. ‘I never got the job and they never got schooling,’ said 67-year-old Ralebenya Khomo ea Maje. ‘I would like to know who is responsible for all the broken promises.’

Also at the 2015 ceremony was a local mother, Mrs Lineo Jobo, who was persuaded by Sentebale to take along her 13-year-old daughter Selekane who is neither an orphan nor suffering from HIV.

Sentebale’s trustees, including Prince Harry, have stepped down from the charity’s board as a ‘result of a loss in trust and confidence’ in the chairwoman, Dr Sophie Chandauka

‘We saw Prince Harry but we were not allowed to take photos. He took individual Polaroid snaps of each child which they were told they could have as a memento to take away. The publicity was strictly controlled,’ she said last week. ‘I believe my Selekane was invited to make up numbers.’

Sentebale responded to the concerns I had heard from locals, saying: ‘We welcome and encourage greater awareness of the challenges faced by people living in and around the area of the Sentebale headquarters. We are committed to working closely with local communities and development partners to co-create interventions that are not only relevant but responsive to current realities.

‘This collaborative, community-driven approach also underpins our decision to ensure leadership is rooted in the region. In January 2025, we took a significant step forward by relocating our most senior roles, including the Executive Director, to southern Africa, reinforcing our commitment to locally led, locally informed development.’

After my Little Angels school visit, I remembered chatting to the Matela family with five orphans living on the breadline on Sentebale HQ’s doorstep.

I asked Liketso if she knew Prince Harry’s charity was interested in fighting climate change as well as helping HIV orphans. She looked at me quizzically, then asked: ‘What is climate change?’

Then she walked back to her tiny shack and the orphans, aged three to 15, who appear to have been forgotten by Prince Harry’s beleaguered charity – even though it promised never to forget.