Prince Harry raises £1.5m to help AIDS orphans, but where has the money gone?

12 April 2012
The plight of these African children moved Prince so deeply that he founded a charity that has raised £1.15million. So why have they received just £10,000 as £600,000 languishes in a bank account, £49,000 went on 4x4 vehicles and the charity boss enjoys a deal worth £100,000?

Four years ago Prince Harry reached out to a group of African orphans, took their tiny hands in his and promised to improve their lives.

He was so touched by the plight of abandoned and HIV-infected children at the Mants'ase orphanage in remote Lesotho that he filmed a one-hour documentary to go with his promise.

He called the film The Forgotten Kingdom – Prince Harry In Lesotho.

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Special friends: Prince Harry and Mutsu Potsane at the Mants'ase orphanage in Lesotho in 2006

Within two years he had set up a charity called Sentebale to help all vulnerable children in the southern African kingdom and vowed: "This is a lifetime commitment for me."

His expressions of love and care for the orphans opened the floodgates to donations from people moved by his portrayal of Mants'ase and its struggle to help 50 children.

But today the workers and children there feel they have been increasingly forgotten by Sentebale.

Last week, the organisation's first audited accounts to the Charity Commission were revealed.

They show that despite raising £1.15million from sales of the documentary, last year's star-studded Concert for Diana in Wembley Stadium, charity polo matches and other donations, just £84,000 was handed over to projects such as children's homes, clinics and counselling centres in the first 18 months of the charity's operations.

Over the same period, £472,000 went on staff salaries, setting up an office in Lesotho, buying vehicles, creating a website and other activities.

About £600,000 was left sitting in the bank account. The Mants'ase orphanage received just £10,000.

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Mutsub, pictured (above and below) at the orphanage last week, has thanked Prince Harry for being his friend and asked if he could send him some biscuits

And now Sentebale has stopped funding Mants'ase, blaming poor management and lack of planning at the orphanage for holding up funds.

During our visit to the orphanage last week, the children certainly looked well cared for and seemed happy, well fed and well clothed.

And while the environment may seem substandard to Western eyes, compared with many orphanages in Africa it is quite satisfactory.

But staff say it remains desperately short of medication and vitamins, of pots and pans, bowls for food and warm clothes.

It needs urgent roof repairs and – most importantly – the confidence that it can continue paying its staff and feeding the children.

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In need of repair: Evidence of a leaky roof can clearly be seen inside a dormitory at the Mants'ase orphanage

A volunteer worker said: "We don't know how the children will get through winter. They need multi-vitamins and medicines to prevent colds and flu. It's a big worry."

Harry's special friend at the home is Mutsu Potsane, who was four years old when he ran up to the Prince during that first visit in 2004, held his hand and refused to let go.

Together they planted a tree, watered vegetables and played rugby. The happy pictures of them in the documentary prompted thousands of viewers to dig deep for the fund.

Yesterday Mutsu, now eight, was sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor of the tiny dining-room with other children.

He was eating meat and rice from a plastic bowl. Asked about Harry, he said shyly: "Please say thank you very much to him for being my friend. If he can, please can he send me some biscuits?"

Mants'ase's social worker and home manager Alice Lekitla said: "Mutsu is mad about Harry. He's watched The Forgotten Kingdom something like 20 times to see himself with the Prince.

"When Harry arrived here last time in a helicopter he thought he was dreaming. Recently we showed him pictures of Harry as a soldier and he was very proud. He hopes he will come back."

After his first trip to Mants'ase, Prince Harry teamed up with Lesotho's Prince Seeiso, the younger brother of the King, and together they founded Sentebale.

The word is Sesotho for "forget me not" and the charity was dedicated to Harry's mother Princess Diana and Prince Seeiso's mother, who also died young.

But Harry's well meant desire to provide an umbrella group to help all impoverished children in the country does not appear yet to have produced results where it matters – though it has spawned a host of jobs for staff, whose pay could fund Mants'ase for years.

The charity's head office is in Clarence House, Prince Harry's Royal home in London, where a number of paid part-time directors and administrators run the UK arm of the operation.

Sentebale's director in Lesotho is former NHS executive Harper Brown, who is on a salary and benefits package worth between £90,000 and £100,000 a year.

Harper Brown, Sentebale's £100,000-a-year director in Lesotho

Among the perks are a four-bedroom villa set in a sub-tropical garden in the capital city Maseru, where he lives with his wife. It is staffed by a maid and a gardener, with guards posted outside 24 hours a day.

A new slate-grey Toyota Landcruiser occupies one of the three garages at Mr Brown's home and in the Sentebale office car park a few feet away are a new Nissan X-Trail and two Toyota pick-up trucks adorned with the Sentebale logo.

An education allowance helps the Browns send their three sons to exclusive private schools across the border in Kwazulu-Natal in South Africa. The bill for fees is about £30,000 a year.

Last week, Mr Brown and his family were on a skiing holiday in France and could not be contacted.

All this is a world away from the Mants'ase orphanage, which sits on a hot and dusty triangle of land at Mohale's Hoek and is Lesotho's only home for abandoned children.

Aged from two to 20, they form a huge extended family relying totally on handouts from home and abroad. Now orphanage staff are warning that funds are close to running out.

Home manager Alice Lekitla's salary of £140 a month is currently paid by a group of doctors in Canada and a member of the Mants'ase Board of Trustees, but not for much longer.

"We agreed this arrangement would last two years and that period is up," she said. "I don't know what I will do without someone stepping in to help."

Food, clothes, fuel and other essentials alone cost more than £1,000 a month, and even that is not enough to feed everyone. Alice said: "We need to be able to stop worrying about basic things and get on with caring for the children."

As she spoke, Tsileso, a small boy who cannot walk, was crawling across sand and gravel. The home cannot afford a walking aid for him.

Mampe Moeletsi, who is in charge of teaching and the day-to-day running of Mants'ase, said Harry last visited in November, shortly before his deployment to Afghanistan.

She said: "We talked about their studies. Now I wish I had asked him to buy them bowls for food.

"I thought we were going to be his No1 priority. He seemed to love the children, but surely he must have seen our needs."

In the kitchen, doors hang off plywood cupboards while a three-ring gas hob serves as the cooker for three meals a day for all 50 children and a group of volunteers and staff.

Meanwhile, the Sentebale website boasts of "assisting with the running costs of the home during 2007" and completing "a three-year plan for financing and managing Mants'ase'.

It reveals that on Harry's last visit to the home "there was a tour of the new vegetable plot and chicken house, which are providing a great source of food for the children".

Nowhere does it say that the chicken barn and vegetable garden were provided entirely by an American Christian charity, the Faith Foundation.

The home's needs are still such that Unicef makes occasional visits to bring army blankets and other supplies, and the World Food Programme delivers mealie flour to make pap, a traditional porridge, and pulses, beans and peas.

Clarence House insisted last night that Sentebale's intention had never been "to turn up and start throwing cash around".

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Sentebale's head offices are in a lot better condition compared to the Mants'ase Children's Home which it funds, pictured below

Sentebale chief executive Geoffrey Matthews said: "Prince Harry is not angry about Sentebale's first set of financial figures.

"The important first step for the charity was to establish an office in Lesotho designed to select the projects for the charity to support and offer the management help they so desperately need."

Mr Matthews stressed they had decided to keep costs down by only employing part-time staff in London and that Mr Brown, who opened the Lesotho office in 2007, had been ordered to take between six months and a year to carry out an "initial assessment exercise"and recruit local staff.

Sentebale spent £556,000 in its first 18 months. Sums not spent on local projects included £190,000 on salaries, £86,000 on a website and "other fund-raising activity", £49,000 on "absolutely necessary" vehicles, £26,000 on equipping the office in Maseru, and £47,000 on paying for work on behalf of the charity before it was formally set up.

Mr Matthews said Mr Brown's salary was "typical of an expatriate's package in that it includes benefits such as healthcare, pension, accommodation and help with children's education costs".

Clarence House also said that by the end of August, Sentebale will have spent at least a further £225,000 directly on projects.

A spokesman for Clarence House confirmed that Sentebale had frozen its financial support for Mants'ase.

A spokesman said: "There has been an issue with the quality of the management and Harper Brown has joined the board of Mants'ase to help sort it out, so that we know our funds will be spent well and accountably.

"When a new manager is in place, Sentebale will renew financial support."

• Additional reporting: Simon McGee

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