1 Franc

French West Africa — a federation of eight territories administered from Dakar — issued its own coinage series beginning in 1944 under the Institut d'Émission de l'Afrique Occidentale Française et du Togo. The franc issues of 1948 onward were minted in Paris during a period when metropolitan France was itself rebuilding its monetary infrastructure after the German occupation, which partly explains the lightweight aluminium-magnesium alloy chosen: metal allocation across the empire remained constrained well into the early 1950s.

The federation was dissolved in 1960 when its constituent territories — Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast, and others — each achieved independence, ending the series abruptly.