0,50 Franc

Madagascar's wartime small-denomination notes came about because coin shortages during World War One made low-value fractional currency effectively impossible to keep in circulation — metal was needed elsewhere, and the colony's supply chains were badly disrupted. The Government of Madagascar and Dependencies stepped in with paper fractional issues to fill the gap, a stopgap measure repeated across French colonial territories during this period.

The P#31 series is among the scarcer colonial French fractional issues. Small notes of this type were frequently worn to illegibility and discarded rather than redeemed, which accounts for the survival rate.