100 Nakfa

Eritrea's 2011 note issue was the second complete redesign since the nakfa's introduction in 1997, following a shorter-lived 2004 series. The nakfa itself replaced the Ethiopian birr after Eritrea's formal independence was confirmed by a 1993 referendum, though the currency wasn't actually launched until November 1997 — a four-year gap that reflected the difficulty of establishing monetary infrastructure from scratch in one of Africa's newest states.

Giesecke & Devrient have handled Eritrean banknote production since the original series, giving the country's entire paper currency history a single printer.