At an international level, initiatives to combat the exploitation of child labour are based first and foremost on the development of a series of conventional instruments that must be ratified by individual countries.

The first treaty on child labour was the ILO Convention No. 5 on the minimum age for admission to industrial work of 1919.

This was followed by Convention No. 29 of 1929, which first introduced a prohibition on having children perform activities and/or services under threat of punishment or otherwise not performed voluntarily.