2 Piso Manuel A. Roxas

Manuel Roxas, the first president of the independent Philippine Republic, died in office in April 1948 — less than two years after independence was proclaimed. His government inherited a country devastated by Japanese occupation and the Battle of Manila, and spent much of its brief tenure negotiating postwar reconstruction aid from the United States under the Philippine Rehabilitation Act of 1946.

The nickel clad steel composition adopted for this series in the early 1990s followed the BSP's broader cost-reduction retooling of the circulating coinage, driven by rising metal prices that had made earlier alloys economically impractical.