Melinta Iyaloo did not have someone to call at three in the morning. Not when the bills piled up,
not when the children were unwell, not when the silence of carrying everything alone felt too
heavy to bear. So she built something for the women who know that feeling.
La Luma, as Iyaloo is known to her community, is a single mother of two, an entrepreneur, an
author, and the creator of a free app also called La Luma.
She built it without a technical background, while working full time and raising her children on her own, and she completed her Bachelor of Business Administration in May 2026. The app came not from a business plan but from a memory: what it feels like to need support and find nothing there.
“I built La Luma because I remember what it felt like to have no one to call at three in the
morning,” she says. “This app is not about being perfect. It is about saying: I see you. I have been
there. And you do not have to stay there alone.”
A digital village, not a platform
La Luma is designed to be soft and accessible where many parenting tools are clinical or
overwhelming. It is mobile-first, built to reach single mothers in rural areas and busy cities alike
and it is free. The app offers community, practical resources, and emotional support in one place.
Iyaloo describes it as a digital village, the kind that many single mothers no longer have around
them.
The timing is deliberate. With Mother’s Day falling in May, Iyaloo is using the month to draw
attention to the millions of single mothers who spend the day feeling invisible. Flowers and
breakfasts in bed are not part of most single mothers’ mornings. Recognition, she believes, is.
“Mother’s Day is not about perfection, it is about presence,” she says. “I built La Luma so that no
single mother has to wake up on Mother’s Day feeling forgotten. You are not alone. And yes, you
deserve to be celebrated, exactly as you are.”
Laughing through the hard parts
Iyaloo is also the author of 10 Things Nobody Tells You About Being A Single Mum (But We’ll
Laugh About It Anyway), available on Amazon. The title says something about her approa
honest, warm, and unwilling to pretend that motherhood on your own is anything other than
what it is. She writes to help mothers heal through recognition rather than shame, and there is
humour in it because humour is sometimes the only thing that holds a hard day together.
It is a different kind of self-help. Not aspirational. Not prescriptive. Just a voice saying: this is
what it is actually like, and you are not unusual for finding it difficult.
Why this matters now
Single mothers in South Africa face particular pressures. Many parent entirely without support
networks, financial safety nets, or the flexibility that shared parenting can provide. The visibility
of their experience in mainstream media remains limited, and the support structures that do
exist are often hard to find or inaccessible on a stretched budget and schedule.
La Luma, both the woman and the app, is an attempt to change that in a small but tangible way.
No funding announcement. No corporate backing. Just a mother who decided that the gap
needed filling and found a way to fill it herself.
“Even in the darkest moments, you can become the light,” Iyaloo says. “But first, let someone sit
with you in the dark.”
La Luma is available to download for free on lalumalife.com