2.50 Francs Doany leprosarium

Doany is a small locality in northern Madagascar, and the leprosarium there — like several others on the island during the French colonial period — issued its own internal scrip to restrict the movement of money in and out of the patient colony. The logic was both epidemiological and administrative: currency that had passed through a leprosy settlement was considered a contagion risk, and segregating the local economy was the simplest solution colonial health authorities could implement.

The yellow paper is not incidental — color-coding by denomination was the norm across Madagascar's leprosarium issues, allowing illiterate patients and staff alike to distinguish values at a glance. The Doany series is among the more obscure of these issues and rarely surfaces in collections outside Madagascar itself.