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For children growing up in Kampong Angke, a railway squatter settlement in north Jakarta, one of the first things they learn is that the train’s bell is a death knell for those who come too close. “I saw a man who got hit because he walked into an ongoing train,” says Yenny, 12, who was born in the Kampong.

Kampong Angke, nestled right beside a busy main road and a 15-minute-drive away from some of the city’s biggest malls, is home to more than 300 families. They live in derelict shacks no bigger than a toilet cubicle, where walls are made of discarded wood and the roof, a sheet of corrugated metal. Sanitation is scarce and electricity, a luxury.

Jakarta, home to approximately 13 million people, is Southeast Asia’s most populous city, according to the United Nations World Urbanisation Prospects. About 40 per cent of these people, most of whom migrated from the countryside, live in slums along railways or rivers. The situation in Jakarta mirrors that of other megacities in Southeast Asia, where a quarter of the region’s urban population lives in slums according to a UN Habitat Global Urban Observatory report.

Ooi Giok Ling, a researcher who studies urban planning in Southeast Asia, says that rapid urbanisation – a situation whereby an increasing proportion of the population are living in the city – is to blame for the development of these city slums in the region.

For the millions of poverty-stricken slum dwellers in Jakarta, proper and affordable housing is a major issue. “They don’t just lack money. They also lack an identity, security and culture,” says Wardah Hafiz, 56, founder of the Urban Poor Consortium, a non-governmental organisation lobbying for the rights of slum-dwellers. “These people really have nothing.”

What’s more worrisome for Yenny and her neighbours is that they neither have a legal address nor identity cards. This means limited access to cheap medical aid and poverty alleviation programmes.

However Karsem, 13, is one of those determined to leave. Standing outside her room in Kampong Walang, a railway community infamous for its high crime rates, she says it is difficult being a squatter. “My classmates call my house a wreck,” she says. But Karsem, who is one of the few in her community who made it to high school, is bent on going to university.

“One day I wish to own a proper house,” she says.