City officials announced yesterday the receipt of a $400,000 federal grant to train outreach workers to educate minority women about breast cancer screening.

The three-year grant will pay to train 100 workers who are to tell at least 6,000 women, mostly blacks and Hispanics, how to perform breast self-screening and to get them to take advantage of mammography screening programs.

In Boston, breast cancer is second only to lung cancer as a cause of female deaths. And the rate of breast cancer in Massachusetts is higher than the national average.