1 Franc

Rwanda's post-independence coinage was struck under contract at the Belgian Royal Mint in Brussels — a logistical and political inheritance from the colonial period that persisted well into the 1980s. The aluminium-magnesium alloy chosen for this denomination was strictly practical: low production cost for a country whose monetary system was still consolidating after the 1962 independence and the violent Hutu-Tutsi power transition that followed it.

The eleven-year production window with a shifting alloy ratio suggests at least one mid-run reformulation, likely a response to commodity pricing rather than any policy change.