5 South Sudanese Pounds

South Sudan became the world's newest sovereign state on 9 July 2011, and this note was part of the inaugural currency series issued at independence — the first banknotes ever produced for an independent South Sudan. The Bank of South Sudan had an extraordinarily compressed timeline to commission, design, and print a functioning currency before the formal separation from Sudan took effect. Thomas De La Rue handled the contract, as they had for numerous African independence issues throughout the twentieth century.

The security specification is relatively modest for a De La Rue product of this period — watermark and thread only, no color-shifting ink or latent image features. Given the extremely low banking infrastructure in the country at launch, sophisticated machine-readable security was largely impractical.