Bob Dylan once said that 'money doesn't talk, it swears', but in Hargeisa the capital of Africa's Somaliland it stinks.
It literally stinks, reeking of rotten paper, like a leaky library in a monsoon
That's because there's so much of itFor every dollar there are almost 17,000 Somaliland Shillings and the highest-denomination note is 500 Shillings, which is by no means the most common note in circulation.
Money-changers sit within self-built stacks of money (picture left, video below) and children take wheelbarrows of it from one place to another, reminiscent of 1930s Weimar Germany when the Deutsch Mark became worthless.
By all criteria, cash doesn't work hereCould tiny, unknown Somaliland become the first nation to become a cashless society? It is not only possible, it is almost certainThere is already a surprisingly strong base for this to happen.
Thanks to a cobbled together-by-necessity system of money-transfer posts from Somaliland's diaspora and a surging mobile banking industry, the country has to do away with cashBut first some background...
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