0,05 Franc

The Djibouti Chamber of Commerce emergency cardboard issues of 1919 belong to a broader collapse of small-denomination coinage supply that hit French colonial territories hard during and immediately after the First World War. With centimes effectively vanishing from circulation, local chambers of commerce across French Africa and Asia were authorized to produce their own fractional necessity notes — a stopgap that was never intended to last but in several territories ran well into the early 1920s.

The 0,05 Franc denomination is the smallest in the Djibouti series, and cardboard survivorship is notoriously poor — the material warps, splits, and absorbs humidity readily in the Red Sea climate.