25 Centimes

The Afrique Occidentale Française emergency cardboard issues of 1917–1920 were a direct response to wartime metal shortages that stripped French West Africa of its small-denomination coinage. Individual colonial territories — Côte d'Ivoire among them — were authorized to issue their own fractional notes, which accounts for the territory-specific overprinting on what was otherwise a federated series. Cardboard as a substrate was a practical compromise, though it wore badly in the humid coastal climate.

De La Nézière, a painter and illustrator with deep roots in French North and West Africa, brought genuine regional experience to the design work — unusual for colonial scrip of this type, which typically recycled generic allegorical imagery with no connection to the issuing territory.