<p>Availability of abundant water resources data is a great concern hindering adoption of deep learning techniques (DL) for disaster mitigation in developing countries. However, over the last three decades, a sizeable amount of DL publication in disaster management emanated mostly from developed countries with efficient data management systems. To understand the current state of DL adoption for solving water-related disaster problems in developing countries, an extensive bibliometric review coupled with a theory-based analysis of related research documents is conducted from 1993–2022 using Web of Science, Scopus, VOSviewer software and PRISMA model schema. Results revealed a ‘slightly’ increasing trend of DL-based water disaster publication in developing countries (<em>tau</em> = 0.35, <em>p</em> = 0.00045, Sen-slope, s = 0.00 at confidence level of 95 %), as opposed to the ‘significantly’ increasing trend globally (<em>tau</em> = 0.910, <em>p</em> = 1.72 e-12, Sen-slope, s = 2.52 at confidence level of 95 %). Also, pluvio-fluvial flooding is found to constitute 78 % most disaster prevalence and China is the only ‘high human development’ developing country with an impressive 51 % DL adoption rate, due to China’s increasing need for AI-based solutions to persistent multiyear severe water stress, climate change, environmental degradation, recurrent flood, and saltwater intrusion into estuaries. COVID-19 among other factors is identified as a driver of DL adoption. Further analysis indicates that developing countries will experience implementation delay based on their low Human Development Indices (HDI) because model deployment in solving disaster problems in real life scenarios is currently lacking due to high cost. Therefore, data augmentation, transfer learning, intensive research, deployment using cheap web-based servers and APIs are recommended to enhance disaster preparedness. Developing countries can explore these solutions to foster inclusion in global DL-based disaster mitigation approaches.</p>