10 Cents

Sierra Leone's first national coinage was issued in 1964, the year the country established the leone as its currency following independence from Britain in 1961. The Bank of Sierra Leone was created specifically to manage this transition, replacing the West African Currency Board that had served the region as a colonial monetary institution since 1913.

The WACB's dissolution was a deliberate act of economic decolonization replicated across British West Africa in the early 1960s, with Ghana, Nigeria, and The Gambia all breaking from the shared currency arrangement within the same decade.