Prince Harry to leave African Parks board in South Africa
Prince Harry will leave the board of the South Africa-based conservation organization African Parks in the coming weeks. The organization said his departure is linked to changes in the composition of its board of directors. Harry was president of African Parks from 2017 to 2023 and later joined its board.
As Deutsche Welle English reports, Dutch journalist and author Olivier van Beemen, who investigated the organization’s activities, believes that the connection between African Parks and the prince increasingly became a burden for both sides. According to him, Harry’s popularity attracted media attention and helped the organization establish contacts with potential donors, but allegations of human rights violations made this cooperation problematic.
Management of conservation areas
According to its own data, African Parks manages 24 conservation areas in 13 African countries, with a total area of more than 20 million hectares. By 2030, it plans to increase the number of parks under its management to 30. African governments grant the organization long-term management of such areas, while the land formally remains state-owned.
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African Parks is responsible for nature conservation, infrastructure, tourism and anti-poaching measures. For this purpose, the organization employs armed rangers, and in some cases its authority extends to border control. Van Beemen said that critics of the organization call it a “state within a state” because of the scale of its influence in the territories it manages.
Allegations of human rights violations
The most serious allegations concerned Odzala-Kokoua National Park in the Republic of the Congo and became known in 2023. Representatives of the Indigenous Baka people alleged violence, torture and sexual violence by African Parks rangers.
The organization commissioned the London-based company Omnia Strategy to conduct an investigation. Two years later, African Parks acknowledged individual cases of human rights violations but did not publish the full report. Van Beemen claims that the document was also not shown to the government of the Republic of the Congo. African Parks rejects the journalist’s assessments, stating that his book “Beasts and Men” contains hundreds of factual errors and misleading claims. The organization also emphasizes its zero-tolerance policy toward abuse, human rights training and complaint mechanisms.
