20 Kwacha

The P#32 was part of a mid-1990s series refresh that coincided with Malawi's rocky transition toward multiparty democracy — the 1994 elections ended three decades of Hastings Banda's one-party rule, and the new government inherited an economy battered by donor aid suspensions and severe drought. De La Rue had printed Malawian notes continuously since the Reserve Bank's establishment in 1965, making this one of the longer unbroken printer-issuer relationships in sub-Saharan Africa.

The watermark remains the sole security feature — modest even by mid-1990s standards, when magnetic inks and security threads were already common on regional issues of comparable denomination.