Since I work in finance, you might guess that I have a decent collection of local currency from around the world. My favorite bill so far is a color one from Indonesia with an Orang Utan on it. Most countries have at least one nice bill, but Madagascar has a whole colorful family of bills and they are pretty clean too!

The current Ariary only replaced the old Malagasy Francs about ten years ago, so the bills are all modern and colorful and show a variety of cool things that Malagasy’s are proud of, it seems.

I thought that seven different denominations seemed like a lot until I realized that the US has six that are commonly used. Japan, on the other hand, has only three bills, partly because coins cover all the transactions under 10USD. There are coins here in Madagascar, but they are not so commonly used because the smallest paper bill is worth about 0.04USD.