Marriage shifts responsibility for the young person's well-being out of the birth family and towards a new broader network of family on which to draw, "forming an important safety net in a time of widespread deaths" (ibid.). Without ready recourse to marriage, boys may remain without relatives, with little education and without work, a situation that offers little in the way of immediate support or connections that may assist future integration into new social networks. Earlier in the paper we presented the example of adolescents' participation in a form of casual wage labour in Malawi that has recently expanded into urban areas. It is evident from recent research that adolescents make ganyu arrangements independently of parents who have no influence in these relationships (Mkandawire et al., They draw attention to the hierarchical relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, yet at the same time showed their 'equivalence' in the sense that both were incomers to a patrilineage to which they have or will contribute work and children. These qualities are now replaced by deteriorating neighbourhood social support that forces every individual to earn what they can each day to meet basic needs.