There is growing evidence linking water, sanitation and hygiene (WaSH) to women’s empowerment in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where WaSH is quintessentially a gendered issue. However, current empowerment approaches typically reduce outcomes to narrow measures of infrastructure access or participation in WaSH decision-making. Engaging with women’s own understandings of empowerment is rarely considered. Drawing on Kabeer’s theorization of empowerment as the expansion of strategic life choices, this paper reports the results of oral histories (n=32) with older women in rural and peri-urban communities in Northern Ghana focused on how these women conceptualize and experience WaSH empowerment. Findings reveal three key insights. First, women understand WaSH empowerment not as a discrete outcome, but as fundamentally embedded in their broader social roles, particularly their capacity for caregiving, income generation, and community leadership. Second, participants emphasized that meaningful empowerment requires integrating WaSH improvements with broader economic opportunities and institutional reforms that address underlying patterns of disadvantage. Third, women view empowerment as requiring collective rather than individual approaches, highlighting the importance of women’s groups and careful engagement with existing social structures. These insights suggest that while WaSH interventions remain crucial for improving women’s lives, their transformative potential can only be fully realized when deliberately connected to broader empowerment and gender equality objectives. These results advance our theoretical understanding of the WaSH-empowerment nexus while providing practical insights for designing more integrated and locally responsive interventions that can meaningfully enhance women’s wellbeing in LMICs.