Cape Town saw the creation of 89 000 jobs in the last quarter of 2017, making it one of the the best performing metros in South Africa.

This is according to City of Cape Town Mayor Patricia De Lille who on Tuesday said: "Today, I am pleased to reflect on the city’s encouraging economic results where 89 000 more Cape Town residents were employed in the fourth quarter of 2017 than during the same period in 2016. In addition, Cape Town has the lowest official unemployment rate, at 21.7%, of all the metros in South Africa.”

In a statement, De Lille said Cape Town’s growing employment is a testament to the City of Cape Town’s efforts to create an enabling environment for businesses to invest and to create new jobs.

“The recent quarterly labour force survey 2017 for the fourth quarter, from October 1 to December 31, 2017, shows that Cape Town’s strict unemployment rate is far below the national strict unemployment rate of 26.7%.

“Cape Town’s job creation efforts continue to yield positive results as our unemployment rate is lower than all the other major cities, including, eThekwini (21.9%), Tshwane (26.9%), Johannesburg (28.2%), Ekurhuleni (33.6%) and Nelson Mandela Bay (36.9%),” she said.

According to De Lille, Cape Town’s strict unemployment rate decreased by 1.5 percentage points from the previous quarter and decreased by 2.2 percentage points on a year-on-year basis. The city has the lowest expanded rate of all major cities. Cape Town’s expanded rate of unemployment (23.5%) is far below the national expanded rate (36.3%).

“Statistics South Africa’s figures show that the number of unemployed people in Cape Town has decreased on a quarter-on-quarter basis by 30 235.

“At present, 1 285 791 Capetonians are employed in the formal sector, while 170 089 are employed in the informal sector. Encouragingly, this is the sixth consecutive quarter that the employment level in the city has increased.”