The paper discusses alternative ways of measuring the economic efficiency of project related training and proposes a model for an empirical evaluation. Data from fifty two agricultural projects have been used to analyse the relationship between the economic outcome of these projects and the amount ot training wich took place in them. The rsults show that there is a statistically significant positive link between the size of the training component and the economic success of the project, the rate of return on training espenditures is very high and there exists a strong complementarity between training and the adult literacy rate of the country is high. Sub-saharan Africa's low economic succes in agricultural project is partly due the low literacy rate in the region.