How Oho Protects Australia’s Most Vulnerable

Oho began from a confronting realisation in the Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse: that people with no right to work with children were still slipping through the compliance gaps of a fragmented system.

The founding team of Claire Rogers, Cameron Bedford and Daniel Muggeridge saw how easily someone barred or suspended on one government register could remain employed or move to another care-based workforce undetected.

Blind spots were being caused by fragmented government registers, manual document reliance and a high workforce turnover in the community and care sector. 

These gaps were once again exposed in Victoria’s childcare sector in 2025, where compliance failures demonstrated how vulnerable the system remained, and the real impact to children, families and employers.

“We have seen too many examples where predators exploited gaps in government registries,” says Oho CEO Liv Whitty. 

“That is what compelled our founders to build something that was always monitoring and didn’t rely on screenshots or manual uploads.”

Oho is now Australia’s only continuous workforce screening platform. It connects to 23 government registers to verify an employee’s right-to-work and their safeguarding credentials for organisations.  

“When an employer asks for checks, the prospective candidate might show a picture or upload their credentials manually,” Liv says. 

“But a childcare centre, for example, typically experiences a 40 per cent turnover every year. So it’s incredibly difficult to monitor 23 registers including Working with Children Checks,teacher accreditations, visas and NDIS checks. It all falls down because there is no reliable way of doing it, other than Oho.”

Oho automates the process and monitors credentials continuously. If a person’s status changes, employers are notified rapidly to enable action. To date, the platform has identified more than 600 red-flag incidents including suspensions and revocations that prevented unfit individuals from working with vulnerable people.

The support is critical in five high-stakes sectors served by Oho, from disability care, aged care and education to community sport and faith-based groups.

Part of what accelerated Oho’s early growth was a capital injection from the Alice Anderson Fund, part of Innovation Victoria’s mission to back women-led startups.

“The Alice Anderson Fund was instrumental in helping Oho get to its first $1 million,” Liv says. “They backed the founders when there was no precedent for what we were building. Their investment opened doors for us, helped validate the technology and gave us advisors in the startup ecosystem.” 

Oho quickly accelerated early traction and built credibility.

Many of Oho’s earliest adopters came from large care and community organisations with strong duty-of-care responsibilities, including Tennis Australia, Scope Australia and Melba Support Services. 

Today Oho supports more than 140 organisations and monitors about 220,000 workers, which ultimately protects 4.2 million children & vulnerable people across Australia. 

Oho’s next chapter centres on helping government implement overdue child safety reforms. The platform already acts as a de-facto safeguard for many organisations, and the team is now advocating for formal recognition as trusted, government-endorsed safeguarding infrastructure.

“With so much attention on childcare providers, we have a once-in-a-decade moment for child safety reforms,” Whitty says. “We are focusing our energy into becoming an endorsed industry provider that continuously checks whether workers are safe to deploy. Government reform naturally takes time, but the momentum is here and we can help them deliver outcomes.”

Oho’s customers are relying on the platform more than ever, with some organisations increasing their monitoring frequency from weekly checks to daily monitoring to match the scale and churn of their workforces.

With increasing demand and government reform on the horizon, Oho is well-positioned to help redefine how Australia safeguards its most vulnerable people.