Water resources is the main bottleneck restricting the social and economic development in Yan'an. Improving use efficiency of water resources is very important for alleviating water shortage problem in this region.This paper selected seven indicators such as water consumption per ten thousand Yuan industrial output to build water use efficiency evaluation system. At the same time, the efficiency of water resources was analyzed and evaluated by the projection pursuit model based on genetic algorithms.The result shows that the utilization efficiency of water resources is high in the whole region, and the water consumption per ten thousand Yuan industrial output is the main influence factor of utilization efficiency of water resources. According to the optimal projection vector,it put forward the improvement measures of enhancing the utilization efficiency of water resources in Yan'an.