5000 Cedis Small

Ghana's 5000 Cedis note existed because the cedi had collapsed so thoroughly under decades of inflation that by the mid-1990s it took thousands of them to buy a loaf of bread. The denomination wasn't ambition — it was triage. The entire small-format series was Ghana's attempt to rationalize a currency that had shed most of its value since the early 1970s, when the cedi still traded near parity with sterling.

Thomas De La Rue printed the series across a ten-year window, an unusually long run that reflects how slowly Ghana's monetary situation stabilized. The 5000 Cedis was eventually rendered obsolete by the 2007 redenomination, which introduced the Ghana Cedi at a rate of 10,000 old cedis to one new unit.