500 Shilingi

Tanzania's 500 Shilingi note of 1997 falls within the fourth series issued by the Bank of Tanzania, a period when the country was still absorbing the economic shocks of structural adjustment programs pushed hard by the IMF through the late 1980s and 1990s. Inflation had ravaged the shilling for years — by the mid-1990s, the 500-shilling denomination that would once have been a significant sum had become pedestrian daily currency.

Giesecke & Devrient's Leipzig facility printed continuously through the Cold War division of Germany as a state enterprise under the GDR, reunifying with the Munich parent operation after 1990. By 1997 the consolidated firm was well into its post-reunification expansion of African central bank contracts.