The walls and bottom are often covered in brick and/or coated with cement to reduce water loss due to infiltration to groundwater.
At the top, they are open but often covered with canvas to reduce evaporation, or (in poorer villages) with nets on which is laid anything that provides shade (branches, straw, etc.).
In villages with poor water availability, feed channels can be a few kilometres long, and take the form proper canals coated with cement and/or covered.
In the late 1950s there were only still only a few water points in the Haud, a vast steppe on the border of Somalia and Ethiopia of importance to nomads with their cattle.
Nomads roamed according to a traditional seasonal migration and always had to take into account the number of days to walk to the next place where they could water their cattle.