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Kampong Angke, nestled right beside a busy main road and a 15-minute-drive away from some of Jakarta’s biggest malls, is a railway squatter settlement 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.”