Ghana's 1979 FAO coinage was issued under the Food and Agriculture Organization's global program encouraging member nations to mint coins promoting agricultural development — a program that produced hundreds of distinct issues across dozens of countries through the 1970s. Ghana's participation coincided with severe economic deterioration under the Supreme Military Council, a period when actual purchasing power of the cedi had collapsed so dramatically that a one-cedi coin represented increasingly little in daily commerce.
The heptagonal format was adopted specifically to aid identification by touch in low-literacy rural populations, a practical consideration that drove several West African minting decisions of the decade.
Ghana's 1979 FAO coinage was issued under the Food and Agriculture Organization's global program encouraging member nations to mint coins promoting agricultural development — a program that produced hundreds of distinct issues across dozens of countries through the 1970s. Ghana's participation coincided with severe economic deterioration under the Supreme Military Council, a period when actual purchasing power of the cedi had collapsed so dramatically that a one-cedi coin represented increasingly little in daily commerce.
The heptagonal format was adopted specifically to aid identification by touch in low-literacy rural populations, a practical consideration that drove several West African minting decisions of the decade.