Recent newspaper reports say that Prince Harry was ‘livid’ to find that of the £1.15million accumulated by his charity Sentebale, only £84,000 had actually gone to the children. Sentebale was set up in April 2006 by Prince Harry and Prince Seesio of Lesotho, to help children who have been orphaned by the HIV virus in Lesotho, South Africa. Lesotho itself has the 3rd highest infection rate in the world, with more than 35% of its inhabitants carrying some strain of the deadly virus. Adult life expectancy is low, with figures estimating a meagre forty-eight years for men and fifty-six for women.
Sentebale – meaning “forget me not” in the language of Lesotho, was named to commemorate the tireless effort towards AIDs awareness performed by Princess Diana during her lifetime of charity work. The Princes first came up with the idea for the charity when Prince Harry took the time to visit for 2 months whilst on his gap year in 2004.
This visit first brought to light Lesotho’s growing HIV problem, with ITV commissioning a documentary team to follow the Prince in the making of “The Forgotten Kingdom – Prince Harry in Lesotho”. Having just watched this documentary myself, it’s heartbreaking stuff. So heartbreaking in fact, that after the first airing of the show a massive £600,000 was donated by viewers. The documentary was then sold around the world for another £500,000. This money was then donated to the British Red Cross Lesotho Fund, who were struggling for funds before the programme aired.
Sentebale were one of the main beneficiaries of the 2007 Concert for Diana which was seen by over 500 million people in 140 countries. Plus, in the last 2 years alone, they have raised £1.15m. So the question has to be: “where has all the money actually gone?”
As is oft the case when people give generously to worthy causes, there’s always a legitimate desire to know that as much of their donation as is possible has actually found its way to where it can do the most good? So how is Sentebale doing in that regard? In the first set of accounts filed to the Charity Commission, with £600k worth of undistributed donations still in the Sentebale account, it works out that for every £1 donated to the fund 60p went towards distribution.
So how is the money you give to charity actually spent?
Charity expenditure is usually broken down into 2 main factors :
- the campaign cause
- generating income and management.
Obviously, every business has manpower costs, plus advertising needs to be budgeted for – to gain public interest that leads to donations. But how much from your donation is spent on wages, and how much is spent on the actual cause / issue to which you’d contributed?
Here’s the breakdown of the ‘per pound expenditure’ for some of the UK’s leading charities :-
| Charity Name | Cause / Issue | Advertising & Admin |
| UNICEF | 93p | 7p |
| OXFAM | 89p | 11p |
| RSPB | 87p | 13p |
| CANCER RESEARCH | 80p | 20p |
| NSPCC | 74p | 16p |
| SHELTER | 71p | 29p |
| WWF | 70p | 30p |
Top of the pile is UNICEF, though with 64% of their funds coming from the Government, a lot less needs to be spent on advertising. What these figures do show is that the majority of your donation DOES go towards your chosen charities major initiative, not on unnecessary behind the scenes expenditure.
But surely, when the running costs exceed the donations being handed out, can the term ‘charity’ still apply? The £86,000 spent on the Sentebale website alone is more money than the orphans of Lesotho received from the charity.
Obviously in the early days of Sentebale there’ll be start-up costs that won’t be repeated year-on-year and over time they’ll hopefully start to get their admin costs under control. However, what is pleasing to note from the figures above is that, typically, the major part of your donation DOES indeed get put to good use ‘at-the-sharp-end’.
Hopefully, this early expenditure review of the Sentebale accounts will enable the Princes’ high-profile, sterling work in Africa to continue to bear fruit – and that those charged with administering Sentebale on their behalf, will take this opportunity to benchmark their admin performance against some of the best charity organisations. We wish them well in their endeavours.
