The purpose of this work is to enhance the life insurance underwriting process by building a knowledge-based system for life insurance underwriting. The knowledge-based system would be useful for organizations, which want to serve their clients better, promote expertise capture, retention, and reuse in the organization. The paper identifies the main input factors and output decisions that life insurance practitioners considered and made on a daily basis. Life underwriting knowledge was extracted through interviews in a leading insurance company in Kenya. The knowledge is incorporated into a knowledge-based system prototype designed and implemented, built to demonstrate the potential of this technology in life insurance industry. Unified modelling language and visual prolog language was used in the design and development of the prototype respectively. The system's knowledge base was populated with sample knowledge obtained from the life insurance company and results were generated to illustrate how the system is expected to function.