1000 Francs CFA Elephant Mother with Young

Ruthenium plating on numismatic silver became fashionable in the early 2010s as European minting houses — particularly the Bavarian State Mint and B.H. Mayer's — competed for African central bank contracts by offering increasingly elaborate surface treatments. Burkina Faso, which uses the West African CFA franc managed by the BCEAO, licenses its name for these collector issues without any meaningful domestic circulation; the coins are produced entirely for the international numismatic market and rarely, if ever, enter Ouagadougou.