Money Money Money

I realized that many of you have probably never seen what francs CFA (francs des Communautés Financières d'Afrique) look like, so I took a picture of the bills and coins I had on hand.

The bills are like European bills, in that they get bigger in size as they get bigger in amount (and they’re different colors). Here are the 500 FCFA, 1000, 2000 and 10000 bills:

And here’s the 5000 FCFA bill (didn’t get one until a few days later):

I’m sure there are also bigger bills for 50000 or 100000 FCFA, but I certainly hope I never get any. Sometimes I feel like it’s a big enough inconvenience to break a 10000 bill.

Here are some of the coins; I know that there are also coins for 100 FCFA (but that’s how you pay for “parking” so I keep using mine up) and for 500 FCFA, but I don’t have any at the moment. They’re fairly similar to these anyway.

The other side of each coin has a picture of the mask (that you see in the center of the 5000 bill), and says “Banque Centrale des Etats de l’Afrique de l’Ouest” (BCEAO) around the outer edge. There are two types of francs CFA, one is central Africa, and one is West Africa (my currency code is XOF). Last I checked, 1USD = about 481 FCFA, so I round to 500 to make the math easier (1 EUR = is about 650 FCFA).