10 Kwacha

The 1997 date places this note late in a period of acute fiscal stress for Malawi — the IMF and World Bank had suspended aid disbursements in 1992 over governance concerns, and the country's transition from Banda's one-party state to multiparty democracy in 1994 left the Reserve Bank managing serious exchange rate instability. The kwacha had lost significant ground against the dollar through the mid-1990s, and notes of this denomination were passing through hands quickly.

Thomas De La Rue's involvement here is unremarkable by regional standards — they printed the majority of Malawi's notes across this period — but the cotton substrate on a note of this size and denomination was a deliberate cost-acceptance, since lighter-use denominations in neighboring countries had already shifted to polymer by this point.