ABIDJAN, April 28 (Reuters) - Ivory Coast began the sale on Monday of an 8-year 120 billion CFA franc ($253.14 million) bond with a 6.55 percent coupon, one of the bond's leading managers said.

The bond will be listed on West Africa's BRMV bourse and marketed to investors across the region's CFA currency zone from April 28 to May 15. It will be sold in units of 10,000 CFA.

"The bond will be used to finance the construction of infrastructure," an official at Sogebourse, one of the leading managers of the bond issue and a subsidiary of Societe Generale's local unit SGBC.CI , told Reuters.

Ivory Coast, the world's top cocoa producer and French-speaking West Africa's largest economy, is recovering from a decade-long political crisis that ended in a brief 2011 civil war.

($1 = 474.0430 CFA francs)

(Reporting By Loucoumane Coulibaly; Editing by David Lewis, Larry King)

((loucoumane@hotmail.com))

Keywords: IVORYCOAST BOND/