ISO 3166-2:ZA is the entry for South Africa in ISO 3166-2, part of the ISO 3166 standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which defines codes for the names of the principal subdivisions (e.g., provinces or states) of all countries coded in ISO 3166-1.
ZA hails from Dutch: Zuid-Afrika. Currently for South Africa, ISO 3166-2 codes are defined for 9 provinces.
Each code consists of two parts, separated by a hyphen. The first part is ZA, the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code of South Africa. The second part consists of two or three letters indicating the province.