I have just spent three months volunteering at a school in Cambodia, working on administrative matters. It occurred to me that people, especially those who have worked for awhile, may not think about the business and training skills they could provide if they want to volunteer. I was concerned that there would only be opportunities for teachers and trade skills but if you have a professional or administrative or financial or care background it would be well received. There seems to be a real need for all sorts of skills now in the small local NGOs, schools and businesses set up to make and sell goods. You could give assistance in setting up processes, systems, record keeping and library work. There is a need for training in sport/exercise, therapies (physio etc) and special needs teaching. If you have worked with the aged or disabled, teaching the basics in simple treatments and handling techniques would be helpful. Skills in marketing, design work for newsletters, brochures etc, web design could be useful to all these organizations trying to sell in a competitive market.
Volunteering is enormously satisfying and as labour is usually easy to come by, it's best if you can provide something the organisation can't obtain, usually because of the high cost of those resources. Demonstrating, teaching and using your skills are much more useful and you will be leaving something relevant behind. Find an organization you like and see if there is a project that can be completed in half the time you have (it will take much longer than you think because of language, cultural differences etc). Some examples are - setting up medical records for a school or orphanage, preparing a mailing list for fund raising, doing an audit on their accounts, preparing material for funders - there are hundreds of opportunities if you look beyond the services these organisations provide and consider how you can help them provide the services better, cheaper, more effectively.
One last point - many people donate English books to orphanages and schools but really books in their own language would be much more useful. A second language is learned much more readily by someone who can read and write well in their first language. In Cambodia, I saw libraries with many lovely, pristine English books and just a few well read, tattered Khmer books.
