Sustainable development and Goal 8 of the UN Agenda 2030: decent work and Muhammad Yunus' vision of "A world of three zeros"

Abstract

Through the article presented herein, the objective is to analyze the goal of "zero unemployment" envisioned by Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize winner, with a focus on decent work, as outlined in Goal No. 8 of the Sustainable Development Goals - SDGs of the 2030 Agenda. From a critique of market dynamics, in the face of the unemployment problem that, in 2023, affects 208 million individuals worldwide, Yunus advocates and promotes the spread of entrepreneurship as a means to accelerate economic growth, particularly among youth and women. Through opportunities offered to people who typically would not fit into traditional job vacancies, the creator of microcredit and the pioneer of social business demonstrates that universal entrepreneurship stimulates sustainable development and the creation of new jobs. The methodology involves interdisciplinary research, with an epistemological orientation in critical theory, aiming to integrate theory and praxis in the articulation between the goal of decent work and the socio-environmental perspective of Muhammad Yunus. As an expected result, it is observed that the new economic system proposed by Yunus emerges as one of the paths to achieve the decent work envisioned in the 2030 Agenda, as a means to transform the reality of poverty and global unemployment into the realization of societal progress through the creative capacity of human beings.