Africa is a tough environment in which to do business. The reasons are sadly familiar: Many African countries lack basic infrastructure and political stability, and their reputations for war, famine, corruption, and disease often overshadow abundant opportunities.
But Viet Ngo believes that those opportunities are too big to let these difficulties stand in the way.
Ngo is the president and cofounder of Lemna Corporation, a Minneapolis-based infrastructure design and project management firm. Lemna’s international division builds water, energy, transportation, and housing projects in developing countries around the world. Lemna has completed hundreds of infrastructure assignments around the world, including 321 wastewater and water purification projects. The company’s Lemna Technologies division focuses on water projects in North America. All told, Lemna has more than 600 employees across the globe.
As Ngo flips through a handsome project proposal book while sitting at a large table in his office at Lemna’s headquarters—a former Minnesota lumber baron’s mansion with dark, burnished woodwork and an extensive art collection on display—he points to renderings of one of his company’s most ambitious projects. It’s a town with 4,000 homes, complete with shopping, parks, entertainment, day care, an energy-generation plant, and water treatment facility. The location: Libya.
“The focus of the company in the last 15 years is to do infrastructure development for developing countries,” Ngo says. “We’ve expanded to other areas, like transportation and housing, and industrial and commercial development.”
The African continent holds a certain allure for Ngo. It gives his company a chance to stretch; it’s constantly translating his firm’s project-management skills and engineering expertise into new types of infrastructure projects.
But getting projects in Africa under way is one of Lemna’s biggest challenges. Because the work can get bogged down or stopped altogether, Ngo finds that he must spend as much of his time rallying his employees and keeping project partners and governments interested as doing strategic planning and design. But these are tasks that he’s willing to perform.
“I am a creative force for the company, rather than just an operational force,” Ngo says. “Truly, honestly, the fun part for me is to sit down and plan things out and motivate people, and paint a very good dream for them.”
If he sounds as much like an artist as an engineer, it’s because he’s both.
Starting With Duckweed
Ngo grew up in South Vietnam, the son of a member of the South Vietnamese military’s high command. As he approached his college years, a friend of his father’s named Harold Chase—a U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense who was in Vietnam to help its government with strategic planning—persuaded the young man to come to the University of Minnesota, where Chase had once been a professor of political science. But Ngo, who was studying French at the time, didn’t speak English, and he told Chase that he wanted to continue his studies in France.
