South Africa's Northern Cape is stepping up its efforts to attract new capital, create jobs and establish itself as a new industrial growth frontier, as the province hosts its inaugural Investment and Jobs Conference.
Speaking at the event, Northern Cape Premier Dr Zamani Saul presented an economic vision focused on accelerated investment, industrial diversification and a stronger role for the province in the national economy. At the heart of that strategy is the goal of creating more than 60,000 new jobs over the next three years and boosting the province's gross domestic product to R200 billion by 2030.
The conference comes as provincial leaders look to transform the Northern Cape's vast land, mineral wealth and renewable energy potential into a more diverse development model. While the province has traditionally relied on primary industries such as mining and agriculture, Saul said the government now wants to build a broader economic base that also includes advanced technologies, astronomy and green energy.
“The PGDP serves as the primary planning platform for the province to address the triple challenges of underdevelopment, which are poverty, unemployment and inequality,” Saul said, referring to the provincial growth and development plan. He said the framework is built around four drivers of change: economic transformation, social equity, environmental sustainability and effective governance.
In economic terms, Saul said the province is deliberately moving to reduce reliance on legacy sectors alongside already established advantages in mining, agriculture and renewable energy to lead the Northern Cape into sectors associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
This pitch is being made against the backdrop of changes in global industrial patterns. Saul argued that industrial competitiveness is increasingly moving toward sectors that can provide four core ingredients: abundant green energy, access to natural resources, a skilled workforce, and reliable infrastructure linking producers to markets. On that basis, he said, the Northern Cape is well positioned to benefit from the restructuring of global and domestic value chains.
Saul said, “It is clear that around the world, industrial advantage is moving toward regions that offer four things: abundant green energy, proximity to natural resources, a trained skills base and access to markets through reliable infrastructure.” “This shift is pulling value chains back towards resource locations, and the Northern Cape is firmly on that trajectory.”
For investors, the province is presenting itself as a rare large-scale development platform. Saul described the Northern Cape as a vast and under-utilized industrial landscape ripe for expansion in energy, mining, agriculture, manufacturing, logistics and tourism.
A central message of the Prime Minister's address was the province's GDP ambitions. The Northern Cape's contribution to South Africa's national GDP has remained roughly stable at around 2.2% for more than a decade, Saul said, adding that this trend underlines the need for “stronger and more deliberate investment efforts”.
The province is now targeting a GDP of R200 billion by 2030. Saul said progress toward that goal is already visible. According to figures cited at the conference, the Northern Cape's GDP grew from R119 billion in 2018 to about R164 billion and is now about R165 billion. He said recent quarter-on-quarter economic growth has been positive, ranging between 0.7% and 1.2% through 2025, which he argues provides the basis for continued expansion.
These growth rates, although modest, are being hailed by the provincial government as evidence that its economic strategy is beginning to gain momentum. Saul said the next phase will require an intensive and accelerated investment campaign capable of changing the current structure of the provincial economy.
Currently, community services have the largest share in the province's GDP at 27.9%, followed by financial services at 16.2% and mining at 17%. Saul indicated that provincial officials want investments to directly strengthen productive sectors and expand industries with strong long-term multiplier effects.
Recent regional trends show that mining is currently the major engine of growth in the province, with a growth of 2.3%, followed by agriculture with a growth of 1.1%. For the provincial administration, he strengthens the case for increasing investment in resource development while deepening performance gains, infrastructure and adjacent industries.
Saul said the province's extensive and still undeveloped mineral endowment creates a clear opportunity to establish the Northern Cape as one of South Africa's prime destinations for mining investment. Meanwhile, agriculture remains a strategic pillar of the economy and, in his words, an inflation-resistant asset during periods of economic stress.
The labor market has also emerged as a focal point in the province's investment case. Although the Northern Cape remains the smallest contributor to national GDP among South Africa's provinces, Saul said it currently has the lowest unemployment rate in the country at 27.1%.
He said the latest labor force data showed a quarter-on-quarter decline of 4.1 percentage points in official unemployment, the strongest improvement nationally. Expanded unemployment, which includes discouraged job seekers, also improved, falling by 3.7 percentage points.
For provincial officials, these figures support the argument that the Northern Cape is not only generating momentum from a low base, but is also showing a comparatively stronger labor market response than many other parts of the country. This will be critical if the province is to meet its stated job-creation targets and give investors confidence that projects are viable and supported by an improving employment environment.
The overarching policy narrative of the conference is that the Northern Cape seeks to move from being seen as a peripheral, resource-rich province to being seen as a strategic production base for the next phase of South Africa's industrial development. Its advantages in solar and renewable energy, its mineral resources, available land and space for industrial-scale projects are being positioned as the building blocks of that transition.
Whether the province can fully realize that ambition will depend on execution: turning conference commitments into shovel-ready projects, building infrastructure, improving skills and maintaining investor confidence. Still, the message of the inaugural conference was clear. The Northern Cape is making a direct appeal to business to support its long-term growth story – and provincial leaders believe the numbers are increasingly supporting that case.