Prince Harry has quietly redirected his share of the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund away from the charity he co-founded nearly two decades ago, sending the money instead to a Botswana elephant conservation group while a defamation lawsuit and a scathing regulatory report hang over the split.
Annual accounts filed by the Royal Foundation of the Prince and Princess of Wales show that Harry's 2025 share of the Diana fund, £5,432, went to Elephants Without Borders, a wildlife charity operating in Botswana's Okavango Delta. It was the first time the money did not go to Sentebale, the charity Harry co-founded in 2006 with Lesotho's Prince Seeiso to support young people living with HIV and AIDS in southern Africa. The Telegraph reported that the last payment Sentebale received from Harry's Diana fund share was £16,743 in 2024. Since 2020, the charity had received a total of £43,866 from that stream.
The switch follows what has become one of the more public, and legally tangled, charity disputes in recent British philanthropic history. Harry and a group of trustees, including co-founder Prince Seeiso, resigned from Sentebale in March 2025. Within weeks, the charity filed a defamation action in the High Court against Harry and former trustee Mark Dyer, accusing them of orchestrating an "adverse media campaign" that caused "operational disruption and reputational harm."
Sentebale's legal filing did not hold back. The charity's board chairman, Sophie Chandauka, identified Harry and Dyer "through evidence as the architects of that adverse media campaign." In a statement issued when the case was filed, Sentebale said it had been forced to divert "leadership time and resources into managing a reputational crisis not of the charity's making."
The charity described the fallout in stark terms:
"Sentebale has experienced the adverse media campaign as false narratives circulated through the media about the charity and its leadership, attempts to undermine its relationships with staff, existing and prospective partners, and the forced diversion of leadership time and resources into managing a reputational crisis not of the charity's making."
Harry rejected the allegations. A spokesman for the Duke and Dyer said the charity should focus its efforts on the communities Sentebale was created to serve rather than pursuing legal actions. Harry himself called the accusations "offensive and damaging."
The case remains unresolved, adding yet another legal proceeding to a growing list for the Duke. Harry has faced a string of courtroom setbacks in recent years, including a privacy lawsuit loss against the Daily Mail that he publicly called a "whitewash."
Britain's Charity Commission, the regulatory body that oversees nonprofits, published its own report into the Sentebale dispute. The regulator pulled no punches in either direction, strongly criticizing all sides involved. The Commission concluded that every trustee contributed to a "missed opportunity" to resolve the problems internally, a failure that, the regulator warned, risked eroding public confidence in the broader charity sector.
One of the more pointed allegations lodged during the dispute involved claims of misogyny and "misogynoir", a term for discrimination targeting Black women, at the charity. The Charity Commission investigated and found no evidence of systemic bullying or harassment, including misogyny or misogynoir. It did, however, acknowledge "the strong perception of ill treatment" felt by some parties.
That finding cut both ways. It undercut the most inflammatory accusations leveled against Harry's side. But the Commission's broader criticism, that all parties let a fixable problem spiral into a public mess, left no one looking particularly responsible. For a charity built to help vulnerable young people in Lesotho and Botswana, the spectacle of its founders and board battling each other in court and in the press is a dismal outcome.
Harry's legal difficulties have not been confined to the Sentebale dispute. His High Court case against the press ended in a comprehensive loss, and the financial consequences have continued to mount.
While the Sentebale saga grinds through the courts, Harry's redirected funds have already been put to use. Dr. Mike Chase, founder of Elephants Without Borders and a friend of Harry's for more than two decades, told The Telegraph that the £5,432 donation paid for satellite-tracking collars fitted to two elephants in the Okavango Delta. The elephants were named Archie and Lilibet, after Harry's two children, and each child chose a collar color: blue for Archie, purple for Lilibet.
Chase, who is counted among what Harry has called his "African family," expressed gratitude for the support:
"It means a great deal to us and to the elephants we are working so hard to protect."
He added that the gesture was designed to connect Harry's children to the conservation work:
"We wanted to pass on that legacy to the kids, in the hope that his passion for Okavango and Botswana would rub off on them, and to allow them to monitor the elephants in real time across the world."
The connection between the Sussexes and Elephants Without Borders predates the Sentebale fallout by years. Harry and Meghan took a romantic trip to Botswana shortly after they first met. They later joined Dr. Chase to track and tag elephants on World Elephant Day. Meghan also narrated the Disney+ documentary *Elephant*, donating her fee to Elephants Without Borders. Fox News reported that Meghan recorded her voice-over work secretly at London's Pinewood Studios, with Harry attending the session and suggesting alternative pronunciations for African words based on his years spent in Botswana.
Harry had previously demonstrated significant financial commitment to Sentebale beyond the Diana fund payments, donating £1.2 million from the profits of his memoir *Spare* to the charity. An unnamed source described Harry as "emotionally devastated" by the breakdown after 19 years of work with the organization.
The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund was established shortly after Diana's death in 1997. It formally closed in 2012 but continues to receive occasional legacies and donations. The fund is now legally controlled by the Royal Foundation of the Prince and Princess of Wales. Under an agreement reached in 2020, when Harry and Meghan stepped back from royal duties, the fund's annual income is split between Harry and his brother Prince William, each directing his share to charities of his choosing.
The sums involved are modest by royal standards. Harry's 2025 share was £5,432. But the symbolic weight is considerable. Money raised in Diana's name, managed by the institution William now leads, had for years flowed to the charity Harry built as one of his signature philanthropic efforts. Redirecting it signals a clean break, not just from Sentebale's current leadership, but from the project that once defined Harry's charitable identity.
The financial and legal pressures facing the Duke have only intensified in recent months. Between courtroom defeats, mounting legal costs, and now a defamation suit filed by his own former charity, Harry's post-royal career has become a study in institutional friction.
Several open questions remain. Whether the High Court defamation case will proceed to trial or settle out of court is unknown. The current operational status of Sentebale, a charity that lost its most famous co-founder, its other co-founder, and a bloc of trustees in a single month, is unclear. And whether Prince William has continued directing his share of the Diana fund to Sentebale, or has also redirected it, has not been disclosed.
Harry's strained relationships across the royal family provide the broader backdrop. The Duke who once built a charity to help children orphaned by AIDS in one of the world's poorest countries now finds himself sued by that same charity, criticized by the regulator, and sending Diana's legacy funds to track elephants instead.
When the people running a charity for vulnerable children spend more energy on courtroom filings and press wars than on the children themselves, the ones who pay the price are never the people in the headlines.
