Sierra Leone on Friday introduced a new family of banknotes, stripping three zeros off the leone, in a bid to restore confidence in the inflation-hit national currency.

The Bank of Sierra Leone announced the move last August, insisting the public's purchasing power would not be affected by the change.

A note of 10 new leones is the equivalent of a note of 10,000 old leones, which changes hands for around 75 US cents.

Year-on-year inflation in the West African state was 24.87 percent in May, according to the national statistics agency.

Rising prices had driven the printing of banknotes, resulting in a mountain of paper money that is costly to sustain and unwieldy for the public.

Shoppers need huge quantities of banknotes for the simplest transactions, and unscrupulous bank tellers sometimes pilfer notes from sealed bundles of bills.

"We are removing the 'zeros of shame' to get the currency properly aligned," Morlai Bangura, a central bank director, told AFP earlier in the week.

On Friday, customers braving the rain queued at commercial banks to swap their old banknotes for new ones.

"The changing of our currency is necessary -- we were used to carrying bags to the bank to withdraw our money, but not anymore," Alice Frazer, 70, said after exchanging her notes at the Sierra Leone Commercial Bank, a state-owned bank in central Freetown.

The new banknotes have a similar design to the old ones but are smaller in size.

Sierra Leone's eight million people live in one of the poorest nations in the world, ranking 182 out of 189 countries in the UN's Human Development Index.

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