Accenture and the Accenture Foundations have awarded Brazilian social venture Conexão a three-year, $3.3 million grant to expand its efforts to help unemployed Brazilian youth acquire the job and entrepreneurial skills they need to enter and succeed in a twenty-first-century economy.

Awarded as part of Accenture's Skills to Succeed initiative, which aims to equip half a million people around the world with job and entrepreneurial training by 2015, the grant will help São Paulo-based Rede Cidada — which incubated the Conexão program in partnership with Youth Business International — provide vocational skills training to an additional twenty-one thousand young people. The program, which was established with a $1.1 million grant from the Accenture Foundations, has trained more than twenty-five thousand young Brazilians since 2007, approximately nine thousand of whom have entered the workforce and more than three hundred of whom have started or developed a business.

"Our mission is to transform the life of low-income Brazilian youngsters and entrepreneurs and provide them with the skills required for success in the market," said Marcelo Khoury, general coordinator of Conexão. "The extension of the partnership between Conexão and Accenture is really exciting because it will help us bring this dream to reality for thousands more families."