Gembong Hanung, Jakarta – A melting pot of mostly low-income households from diverse cultural backgrounds, the fishing village of Cilincing in North Jakarta is also home to dozens of undocumented children who lack access to basic rights.
Without birth certificates, the gateway for every Indonesian citizen to education, healthcare and other state services, these children are trapped in legal limbo. In many cases, the absence of such documents is linked to unregistered marriages, unclear family ties or bureaucratic hurdles.
But being undocumented children in the fishing village, which sits on the estuary of the polluted Cakung River, comes with added stigma as the area has long been associated with prostitution.
"There have been many abandoned children here, some of them are children of prostitutes," food vendor Dede Ayuhanas told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.
Dede's food stall sits beneath a bridge underpass, where children spend their days attending informal lessons organized by the nonprofit Rumah Belajar Merah Putih (Red and White Learning Center).
Jakarta's coastal neighborhoods struggle as clean water access dwindles.
At night, however, the same spot becomes the base for a small prostitution ring that has managed to survive repeated police raids, even as most red-light districts in the area have been dismantled in recent years.
The learning center founder, Desi Purwatuning, said some of the children attended the classes when they were not working for purse seine fishing boats docked in a nearby port.
"All of these children cannot access formal schooling, either due to lack of legal recognition or financial reasons," Desi told the Post. The center, established in 2006, now serves at least 160 children.
From its small, two-story building by the bridge, the center offers programs from early childhood education to senior high school equivalency diplomas. Yet, for all the help the center provides, Desi still hopes that no more children in marginalized neighborhoods will have to grow up undocumented.
"These unregistered children live in uncertainty, [...] and extreme poverty makes them more vulnerable," she added.
In Indonesia, the 2013 Civil Registry Law requires births to be registered within 60 days. However, for children born in nontraditional circumstances, such as out of wedlock or to parents without legal marriages, obtaining a birth certificate often proves difficult due to legal and administrative hurdles.
While no official data captures the exact number of undocumented children, estimates suggest that between 5 and 7 million across the country remain without legal identity.
In Jakarta, however, coverage is far higher: a 2024 Statistics Indonesia (BPS) report showed that 98.6 percent of children under 18 had birth certificates in 2023, about 7 percent above the national average.
Even so, gaps remain in places like Cilincing. Over the past few months, the Jakarta Civil Registration Office (Dukcapil) has attempted to issue birth certificates there, but most applications were rejected due to incomplete or unclear parental information, said Chico Hakim, a special staffer to Governor Pramono Anung.
"For ground checking, the North Jakarta Dukcapil will conduct data collection again and directly provide services to the area," he told The Post on Wednesday.
The persistence of undocumented children highlights how basic rights, particularly access to education, remain unevenly distributed, said Indonesian Education Monitoring Network (JPPI) national coordinator Ubaid Matraji.
He particularly noted that even the recently launched Sekolah Rakyat (community schools), intended to serve the poorest 10 percent of households, also fail to open their doors to these children.
"The current schooling system cannot accommodate undocumented children as it is overly bureaucratic and fails to recognize the right to education for all," Ubaid said.
Source: https://asianews.network/jakartas-invisible-lives-undocumented-coastal-children-denied-basic-rights