It should be noted that these types of programmes usually originate in and are funded by those countries which contribute the most to development on a governmental level-i.e. Voluntary grants are estimated to equal 20 per cent of official development assistance in the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany and 29 per cent in Switzerland. In some countries these private organizations receive significant government support, and this again makes it difficult to obtain reliable statistics. A more significant way to present figures on voluntary assistance is to express them in terms of GNP, and a list of donor countries ranked on this basis has a somewhat different order from one based on official development assistance. Furthermore, such assistance is untied and generally carried out on a grass-roots basis, so the impact is by no means a simple function of expenditure.
Project evaluation is the general topic of the next chapter.