With the publication of a HIP, DG ECHO informs its partners of the availability of funds for a specific country or crisis and of the planned procedure for allocation of these funds.
Because of the increased level of transparency, DG ECHO expects to receive more proposals from some countries than was the case in the past. In such cases, Partners might be asked to submit Letter of Intent in order to give DG ECHO a global view on how Partners expect to cover the identified needs, without having to draft a full Single Form.
The information to be provided in the Letter of Intent for the first assessment round will be precised in the HIP.
It will generally include at least:
As it is the case for the Single Form, either Partner's HQ or field offices may send Letters of Intent.
If DG ECHO requests Letters of Intent, Partners always remain free to submit a complete Single Form or any other information (such as humanitarian programmes and appeals, CAPs or CHAPs). However, DG ECHO will only carry out the first analysis on the basis of the information requested for the Letter of Intent in the HIP.
If an Letter of Intent is selected, the Partner will be invited to submit a Single Form which will form the basis of a more detailed assessment.
The final decision to fund an action can only be made on the basis of a complete Single Form. Only accepted Single Forms can lead to the signature of an agreement.
How should you submit your Single Form and/or Letter of Intent?
Single Forms should be submitted to DG ECHO using APPEL.
The Letters of Intent to be submitted further to the publication of a HIP should also be transmitted to DG ECHO via the system APPEL eSingle Form.
The system APPEL eSingle Form can indeed be used to create a simplified first version of the eRequest (assimilated to a Letter of Intent).
In practise, this would mean that the Partner should encode the various fields requested in the HIP for the Letter of Intent. The other mandatory fields requested by the system can simply be encoded as “N/A” (Not Applicable).
A template has been prepared by DG ECHO IT team for the Partners to avoid unnecessary encoding of fields.
However, we draw your attention that some HIP's may require some facultative fields to be filled in. Read carefully the HIP before submitting the Letter of Intent.
In order to be able to submit at least one result is needed, you should encode an amount (an estimation of the amount or one symbolic euro if you don't know the amount yet).
The proposal that is created as a result of the Letter Of Intent has to be created as a new version of the LOI, not as a new eRequest/Action.