Tazeen Ahmad

Ahmad was the founder and director of EQ Matters, an emotional intelligence consultancy. She died from cancer on 6 November 2019, aged 48.

The documentaries Ahmad made for Channel 4's Dispatches programme included investigations into sex gangs in the UK, exposés on the world of fashion, credit cards and the cosmetics industry, as well as British schools. The 2013 programme on sex gangs active in Northern England and the Midlands won a Royal Television Society award and the Asian Media Award for Best Investigation, and was nominated for a BAFTA. After a Dispatches programme in 2011 about violence against children in a mosque, a teacher was imprisoned. She also reported for the BBC's Inside Out.

Ahmad's book, The Checkout Girl, was published in August 2009 by The Friday Project/Harper Collins. Over six months, she worked 'undercover' as a checkout assistant in English supermarkets.

Ahmad was born in Karachi, Pakistan to two academics, Shaher (née Bano) and Waheed Ahmad. Her parents' career took the family to Port Harcourt, Nigeria in 1974 and then Edgware, north London in 1981. She attended Little Stanmore middle school, Middlesex, and St Margaret's School, Bushey, in Hertfordshire. Outside her English home, Ahmad experienced what she described as "chronic racism." By the time she was 14, her parents had separated and she spent three years in Islamabad with her father, which restored her pride in her background, before returning to Britain in 1988. She completed her A Levels at Weald College, Harrow Weald, followed by a media and communications degree at the Barking campus of the University of East London.

Farah Tazeen Ahmad (16 October 1971 – 6 November 2019) was a reporter for both American television news and British TV. She was a foreign correspondent for NBC News and an investigative reporter for Channel 4's current affairs show Dispatches. She also wrote a book concerning her 'undercover' investigation (The Checkout Girl, 2009) and for newspapers.