You may submit proposals at any time. However, DG ECHO will not make any formal request for the submission of proposals before the publication of a HIP.
There are two options to fix the date of submission of your proposals: either you have to submit them by a certain date, or you may submit them from a certain date onwards. In the HIP you will find the first option when DG ECHO intends to allocate the bulk of the funds in a short period of time. The second option will be used for a progressive allocation.
There should be at least (unless in exceptional circumstances) 2 weeks between the publication of the HIP and the indicative date for submission of the Letters of Intent/ Single Forms.
The date when you submit your action proposal (on the Single Form or Letter of Intent) no longer influences the eligibility date of individual actions.
The earliest date of eligibility of costs is specified in the HIP (section 5) and can in no case be before either 1st January of Year N or maximum 3 months before the publication of the HIP, whatever occurs last.
In the case of an Action related to a Primary Emergency or Emergency Decision, the start date of eligibility can be the date of the crisis.
There are some important dates related to the financing decision and therefore submission of an action proposal.
It is important to note that the eligibility period of the Agreement may not always correspond to the implementation period of the Agreement. In order to avoid uncertainties on the eligibility of costs incurred between the proposal date and start date of the Action, a distinction must be made between:
The eligibility period of an Agreement may under no circumstances begin before the start date for eligibility of expenses. Furthermore, it should be underlined that this in no way relieves the Partner of the responsibility to prove that costs fulfil all other criteria for the eligibility of costs as set out in the Financial Regulation (Article 27), the Humanitarian Aid Regulation (Article 3), the FPAs (Article 18 of the General Conditions) and the FAFA (Article 3).
eDocuments transmitted via APPEL do not have to be transmitted to DG ECHO by other means (fax, email).
With eSingle Form when encoding a new action as well as subsequent versions of the eSingle Form, a reference number will be attributed in APPEL to each of these eDocuments.
The reception and registration date is the date of submission of the eDocuments. There is no difference anymore between the two dates.
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.
Single Forms should be submitted to DG ECHO using APPEL.
Letters of Intent should also be submitted using APPEL. The fields that are requested as mandatory by the system but which are not required for the Letter of Intent can be encoded as “N/A” (not applicable). In case of positive answer by DG ECHO, the partner will be invited to complement the Letter of Intent by submitting the missing information (this will be a new version of the eRequest).
References and useful links: