In March of last year, Prince Harry and Lesotho’s Prince Seeiso resigned as patrons of Sentebale. They resigned in protest alongside the majority of Sentebale’s board, all because of Sophie Chandauka, Sentebale’s chairwoman. Soon the whole story came out – Chandauka was and is a self-dealing grifter who was spending lots of Sentebale’s funds on various “fundraising schemes” which went nowhere. The board lost confidence in her leadership and tried to force her to resign. Instead of resigning, she threw an international tantrum, ran to Britain’s Charity Commission and claimed that the board and the patrons were harassing her and bullying her. She then concocted a bizarre story about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and how she hated that Harry organized fundraising polo matches and she especially hated that Meghan attended her husband’s polo matches. Instead of treating Chandauka with well-deserved skepticism, the British media platformed her lies and merrily gloated about how Harry would be so hurt to see the destruction of the charity he co-founded.
In the second half of 2025, Sentebale began falling apart under Chandauka’s leadership. She appointed several sycophantic board members and she’s being advised by one of Prince William’s big allies. None of that helped – she effectively mothballed Sentebale’s Children’s Center and looted Sentebale’s reserves. She closed down the charity’s London office and fired everyone there. She also “canceled” all polo fundraisers, big surprise. Well, the Times of London has an update. Some highlights:
Harry will never return to Sentebale: The HIV/Aids charity’s annual accounts say its programmes will shrink by the end of 2026 if efforts to find fresh funding are not successful. “The idea that Harry was ever going to return has been completely extinguished,” a source close to the charity said. “There’s absolutely no way now. It’s all too tarnished.”
Sophie has fired people in Botswana too: The charity recently made a round of redundancies in Botswana, on top of job losses in London, as part of a global restructuring to reduce costs by £1 million. Sources claim one in five staff in Botswana have been made redundant, including the country director Ketlogetswe Montshiwa, and staff said they feared there was a “significant cash flow problem”.
Chandauka was looting the charity as early as the last two quarters of 2024: Published accounts show Sentebale ran through almost all its reserves as the row deepened through 2024. Monthly income fell by a quarter and the amount of cash in the bank, once immediate debts are taken into account, had fallen to £207,000 in December 2024, down from £1.5 million compared with 16 months earlier. Sentebale admitted in the document that it was “close to [the] minimum reserves level”.
A cash flow problem: A source in Botswana said there was “a real cash flow problem” and another said the charity’s operations in Lesotho were “getting into the red”, adding: “It’s not working at all”. They described the workload for those left after the redundancies as “unbearable”. The charity laid off its London staff early in 2025 and, according to locals, “effectively mothballed” the Mamohato Children’s Centre, its headquarters in Lesotho. The charity denied this, saying the centre “remains fully operational”.
No money coming in: A hit to its finances came with the end of the Sentebale Polo Cup, once the charity’s top fundraiser, raising £740,000 a year. The event has not taken place for two years. Sentebale’s leadership said the charity was too reliant on fundraising linked to Harry and claimed to have “made progress in beginning to diversify its funding base”. Yet as the charity suffered financially, it gave an inflation-busting pay rise of 6.5 per cent to staff, including executives, taking the chief executive’s pay to £138,267.
Sophie Chandauka is such a despicable person and her actions have done irreparable harm to Lesthoto and to the children who used to be supported by Sentebale. One of things going unsaid in the British media is that Sophie’s corporate-speak justifications for “diversifying fundraising” and “Sentebale needs to get out of the Sussex business” have blown up in her face. For example, Sophie was throwing tantrums about wealthy people like Serena Williams attending polo matches. Most chairwomen would thank the Sussexes for attracting such big names and make personal appeals to Serena and other bigwigs for donations. Sophie also lied and claimed that the polo matches were not a sustainable fundraising method, and that Sentebale needed to fundraise within Africa alone, rather than seek donations from… wealthy Americans and Europeans. Her frantic lies never made any sense. Anyway, obvious story is obvious – of course Harry isn’t coming back.
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images, ITV.
