25 000 Francs Grand pangolin, essai

Togo's authority to issue commemorative coinage is a licensing arrangement rather than sovereign production — these pieces are struck by foreign mints, typically in Europe, and sold directly into the collector market without ever circulating in Togo itself. The "essai" designation here indicates a trial or proof-type strike submitted for approval, a French-system convention inherited from colonial-era monetary administration and still applied by several Francophone African states decades after independence.

The giant pangolin (*Manis gigantea*) has since moved from "vulnerable" to effectively threatened across West Africa, making 2007 an inadvertently early marker of a conservation collapse that accelerated sharply in the following decade.