R&A Strategic Communications (R&A) is a communications consultancy niched in the natural resources sector – mainly mining.
Over the past 24 years, R&A (formerly Russell and Associates Investor Relations) has grown into a leading southern African communications and reporting agency with more than 50 clients – big and small, listed and unlisted.
Russell and Associates Investor Relations was established in May 1999 by Charmane Russell. Having spent more than a decade in a corporate communications environment, Charmane was well-positioned to establish an agency providing superior service with a personalised touch. Over the years, Charmane has built an expert team with enviable experience and expertise with young, energetic and highlycompetent communications professionals.
Confidentiality and quality – is our business
Our reputation lies in maintaining the integrity and confidentiality of client information. We sign a non-disclosure agreement with all our clients and all our employees.
Importantly, we also emphasise confidentiality by:
- separating public and non-public spaces in our offices
- maintaining documents under one roof
- rigorous version control
- in-house typesetting
- in-house HTML programming
Our clients rely on us to get things right, all of the time. We pride ourselves on doing so, and at least one senior team member is assigned to review and check all documentation for accuracy and sense.


Generative AI and R&A
R&A has always sought to provide added value to our clients, and to do so for a fee that accurately reflects the time and intellectual property used in providing those services. The advent of generative artificial intelligence introduces a number of complex factors into all our lives.
We recognise that that current generative AI models learn from an extremely wide array of data published on the internet, including books, publications, Wikipedia and social media sites, to predict the most likely next word in a sentence. While the outputs of these AI apps tend to be very articulate and compelling, they offer no more than a prediction process. They can fabricate apparent facts that are in fact falsehoods. And they can make up non-existent references and links. And were we to seek to ask an AI app to assist us to draft content based on confidential information not yet in the public domain, it would require us to place into its memory banks your information while still confidential. That would be a breach of the NDAs or confidentiality agreements we have with you. We will not commit any such breaches.
So, while we intend to carry out research to establish how AI will enable us to better serve you, our client, by using its potential as, we think, primarily a research tool, you have our assurance that no confidential materials will be entered into any AI applications. You also have our assurance that no piece of written communication, graphic or anything else that we send to you will be the work of an AI app. Any work sent to you will be our own. And in producing that work, we will have done what we can to ensure that the materials developed for you are produced as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.
Company business compliance details
R&A is 26% black-owned:
- 15% held by shareholder and director Kisten Stern
- 11% held by the R&A Women’s Empowerment Trust.
Through the Trust we support three talented young black women each in getting a quality secondary education at St Mary’s School, Waverly, one of the foremost secondary schools in South Africa.
In addition to extensive staff development and training, we:
- Support four undergraduate students at the University of Pretoria and the University of Johannesburg
- Support external training and development programmes through learnerships for four disadvantage pupils, enterprise development support to two small black owned companies as well as business development support to a small black owned courier company which is a supplier to R&A.
BEE
R&A is committed to black economic empowerment and subscribes to the Department of Trade and Industry’s (DTI) codes of good practice for black economic empowerment. R&A is rated at Level 3 on the DTI scorecard with a procurement recognition level of 110% towards BEE spend. In terms of the Mining Charter III, we are a BEE-compliant supplier as well as being both HDP- and women-owned.
