"And I kind of took it and said, well, why not apply it? Go in the field and apply it and teach as many people as I can how to fish and I will feed them for life. And that's how everything started."
The agriculture expert, who left Ivory Coast in 1989 to study in the U.S. on a Fulbright scholarship, first set foot in Haiti in 1997. He was soon convinced that if he could teach the country's poor fishermen to supplement regular fishing with fish farming, their lives would be transformed.
But his attempts to generate interest in fish farming fell on deaf ears.
"I was just walking around and wondering why that aquaculture or fish culture is not developed in this country? There is so much potential," he said.
"I drew the plan, talked to as many people as I could but nobody was really interested. But you travel around Haiti and you see there are lakes sitting there. And I said well, I know what I'm going to do."
Despite failing to secure private loans or get backing from the Haitian government, Abe decided to forge ahead with his vision and fund the project out of his own pocket.
In 2006, he managed to scrape together $15,000, which he used to buy his first set of tanks and initial batch of fish hatchlings.
Four years later, his hatchery has grown to contain 36 aluminum tanks.
It is there where breeding fish purchased from Egypt and Israel are grown until they reach what's called the fingerling size -- at two months old.
Then the baby tilapia are distributed to the lakeside villagers along with their feed and a portable metallic cage. Four months later the fish are fully-grown and ready to harvest.
"Everywhere that we have our project, there's people that are poor. And they don't want to stay poor. They want to be allowed to improve their life,' Abe says.
