Prince Harry is too young and too unqualified to go to Sandhurst just yet. Gap-year idleness has produced too many tabloid disclosures for his father’s liking, so the Prince of Wales’s younger son has found himself immersed in good works in a distant, deeply troubled land.

Walking in the footsteps of his late mother, Harry emerged from his self-imposed African seclusion yesterday to smile at the cameras and appeal for Britain to help the people of Lesotho.

Since arriving in the tiny mountain kingdom, Harry has been travelling around the country, entirely landlocked by South Africa, working on community projects. He has helped to build a health clinic and a road bridge, has dug irrigation trenches and assisted at an orphanage.

Last month Paddy Harverson, the new spin-doctor at Clarence House, tore strips off a Daily Express columnist for suggesting that the young Prince was a waste of space. Harry’s time in Lesotho would be “anything but lavish”, Mr Harverson promised.

Sporting a crew cut, khaki T-shirt and grey cargo pants, the sunburnt Prince was photographed working in a ten-man gang helping to erect a wire-mesh fence and planting trees around the Mants’ase children’s home near Mohale’s Hoek, 75 miles (120km) from Maseru, the capital.

“It’s fantastic,” Harry said when asked if he was enjoying his stay. “It’s really good fun learning about the culture of the people here.” Yet he had a serious message. “People in England do not really know a lot about Lesotho, but it needs their help; there are all kinds of needs here.”

More than a third of the population has HIV or Aids, and a majority of Lesotho’s 1.8 million people depend on subsistence farming.

Accompanied by his friend George Hill, the son of a former flatmate of his mother, the Prince has come face-to-face with the ravages of poverty and disease engulfing the former British protectorate that is now the poorest nation in southern Africa. The World Food Programme is preparing to feed 600,000 people after three years of drought.

Harry is in Lesotho as the guest of Prince Seeiso, brother of King Letsie III, whose coronation the Prince of Wales attended in 1997. “We are hoping to elevate our national profile,” Prince Seeiso said. “I hope Harry can take home a personal attachment to Lesotho when he goes.”

During a visit to Matsieng, Prince Seeiso’s home village, Harry and George accompanied the local doctor on his rounds of patients infected with HIV and tuberculosis.

“Harry and George were briefed on what they would see there,” Prince Seeiso said, “but they were clearly taken aback by the condition of the people they met, some of whom have only weeks or days to live.”

At the Mants’ase home, which caters for Aids orphans, Harry had struck up a friendship with Mutsu Potsane, 4, who arrived at the home a year ago with his elder brother and sister. Mutsu held Harry’s hand as they planted a peach tree.

Aids-related deaths are now so common that families are overwhelmed with orphaned children and can take in no more.

Miranda Lopez, director of the US Peace Corps, which runs the orphanage, welcomed his visit. “The problem is going to get much worse. Harry is giving us publicity just by being here, and we are going to need all the help we can get.”

Life for Harry and George has not been all hardship. They have been hiking in the mountains, ridden Lesotho ponies and joined thousands of fans to watch Lesotho play Botswana in Maseru’s football stadium.

THE GAP-YEAR GUIDE TO LESOTHO

• Tourists rarely head for Lesotho, a mountainous, landlocked kingdom roughly the size of Belgium
• The head of state is King Letsie III — real name David Mohato — a Roman Catholic educated at Ampleforth College, North Yorkshire, where he was a keen rugby player, and at Bristol University
• Lesotho produces barely 10 per cent of its food requirements. It is the poorest country in southern Africa and relies heavily on international aid to avoid starvation
• The main source of income is from emigrants who work as miners in South Africa and send their wages home. The most profitable crop is marijuana to feed the drugs market in neighbouring KwaZulu-Natal
• There are few night-time attractions in Maseru, the run-down capital, apart from shebeens, which sell local Maluti beer at about 50p per can

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