20 Centavos

The Banco Nacional Ultramarino issued fractional centavo notes for its Mozambique operations in the early 1920s because the wartime metal shortage had stripped small-denomination coins from circulation almost entirely. Paper filling that gap was an uncomfortable stopgap — these low-value notes were heavily handled, passed between dozens of hands before wearing out, and survival rates for undamaged examples are genuinely poor as a result.

The BNU held a long-running monopoly on note issue across Portugal's African territories, and the Mozambique fractional series was among the more short-lived products of that arrangement, superseded once coin supply stabilized.