100 Ouguiya

Mauritania abandoned the CFA franc and introduced the ouguiya in 1973, one of the more deliberate acts of post-independence monetary policy in West Africa — the currency was divided into 5 khoums rather than the decimal 100 subunits used almost everywhere else, a structure rooted in traditional Islamic reckoning. Giesecke & Devrient, who printed this series from Leipzig, have supplied Mauritanian notes across multiple decades and design generations.

P#16 runs across a wide date span for a single pick number, suggesting relatively modest design revision between issues. The security specification is lean for the period — watermark and thread only, without the optical variable elements that G&D were fitting to comparable African issues by the early 2010s.